Durham scientist onboard drilling ship investigating major Japanese earthquake

The 2011 Tohoku earthquake was one of the largest in modern history and caused a devastating tsunami with waves hitting Japan and reaching up to six miles inshore.  

This caused widespread infrastructure damage which ultimately led to melt down of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.  

The earthquake and associated disasters claimed the lives of 18,500 people and displaced more than 160,000. 

In 2013 the Japan Trench Fast Drilling Project (JFAST) took samples from the Japan Trench plate to learn more about what caused the earthquake. 

Now a team of experts, including Durham Earth Sciences researcher Rebecca Robertson, is offshore aboard the Chikyu deep sea drilling vessel to continue the investigations. 

Drilling for knowledge 

The Tracking Tsunamigenic Slip Across the Japan Trench (JTRACK) project will see the team drill through a boundary plate fault at the site of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake to take samples and measure physical properties down the drill hole. 

The team is over halfway through the four-month expedition and have completed drilling through the overriding continental plate to the subducting oceanic Pacific plate. 

They have installed an observatory through the fault and are now in the process of sampling the deep-sea sediments and fault material. 

The researchers have also collected high resolution imaging through the fault zone which will be analysed along with the samples. 

Deepening understanding of unusual earthquake 

Prior to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, scientists believed that though subduction zones - one tectonic plate going under another - hosted some of the largest quakes on Earth, the shallow portion of the fault never broke like it did at depth.  

This was not the case in 2011, as the Tohoku earthquake produced the greatest recorded fault displacement from a single event and slipped all the way to the sea floor.  

Through further sampling of the section of the fault that slipped, the JTRACK team hope to learn more about the processes that caused the unusual earthquake. 

Rebecca is one of only three UK scientists in the 60-plus expedition team which involves experts from Japan, America and Europe. 

 Find out more 

• Discover more about the JTRACK expedition  
• Learn more about Rebecca Robertson 
• Our Department of Earth Sciences is ranked in the top 50 in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2024.  Visit our Earth Sciences webpages for more information on our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.