The 9.0 magnitude earthquake and the subsequent tsunami that devastated Japan's east coast exactly one year ago were not supposed to happen. At least if seismic hazard maps are not cheating. But can modern science really predict such disasters? As Joel Achenbach noted quite rightly in his Washington Post article, Earth paid no heed to scientific orthodoxy. And while geologists were theorizing, a massive slab of our planet's crust moved 55 meters (180 feet) eastwards. It lifted the ocean bed almost 5 meters up (15 feet), and that brought all the might of the waters of the Pacific upon Japan's eastern coast. The Tohoku area of Japan's main island of Honshu suffered the most. The quake and the tsunami killed about 20000 people and wiped out entire towns in several coastal prefectures. And yet no other consequence of this natural catastrophe inflicted so much horror around the world as the Fukushima nuclear crisis. When the tsunami hit the Tohoku area, the destruction it caused ! led to wide-scale power outages. The latter caused failure of cooling systems of the Fukushima nuclear power plant and, eventually, a meltdown of the radioactive fuel inside the plant's nuclear reactors. Science caught off guard The 2011 disaster that hit Japan was not the only one to humble the international scientific community. The same applies to a series of devastating earthquakes that took place at different times since 2004 -- in the Indian Ocean, Haiti, China, and New Zealand. In the aftermath
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