{"id":235754,"date":"2026-04-23T02:39:06","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T07:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/it-wasnt-just-water-the-hidden-force-inside-japans-2011-tsunami-changed-everything"},"modified":"2026-04-23T02:39:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T07:39:06","slug":"it-wasnt-just-water-the-hidden-force-inside-japans-2011-tsunami-changed-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/it-wasnt-just-water-the-hidden-force-inside-japans-2011-tsunami-changed-everything","title":{"rendered":"It wasn\u2019t just water: The hidden force inside Japan\u2019s 2011 tsunami changed everything"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/it-wasnt-just-water-the-hidden-force-inside-japans-2011-tsunami-changed-everything2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Mud-rich coastlines could face a greater tsunami risk, at least that may have been the case for the 2011 T\u014dhoku-oki tsunami that killed more than 19,000 people and led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. According to a new study <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lyellcollection.org\/doi\/10.1144\/jgs2025-161\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the <i>Journal of the Geological Society<\/i>, mud may have made the catastrophic ocean waves more destructive than they might otherwise have been.<\/p>\n<p>On 11 March 2011, a powerful earthquake off the coast of Honshu, Japan\u2019s main island, triggered a massive tsunami. A wall of water swept away boats, cars, and buildings as it surged inland.<\/p>\n<p>Patrick Sharrocks from the University of Leeds and colleagues studied helicopter news footage of the event, noting how the wave passed specific landmarks, such as greenhouses, houses, and road signs, to calculate its speed. They also compared before and after images from Google Earth to measure distances between landmarks and calculate how steep the front of the wave was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mud-rich coastlines could face a greater tsunami risk, at least that may have been the case for the 2011 T\u014dhoku-oki tsunami that killed more than 19,000 people and led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. According to a new study published in the Journal of the Geological Society, mud may have made the catastrophic ocean [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235754\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}