Japan Earthquake On January 1 Shifted Coastline Over 800 Feet, Show Satellite Photos

The powerful earthquake that struck Japan on New Year's Day shifted its coastline by 800 kilometres, new satellite images show. The 7.5 magnitude quake struck the Noto Peninsula on Japan's main island Honshu shortly after midnight, killing 213 people and leaving 26,000 in emergency shelters. Almost 60,000 households were without running water and 15,600 had no electricity supply. The satellite images of the event, released weeks later, have revealed that the force of the earthquake was enough to raise two football pitches of new beach and leave harbours dry.

The images have been shared on X (formerly Twitter) by Nahel Belgherze, who covers extreme weather events around the world.

The earthquake that struck Japan's Noto peninsula on Monday was so strong that the coastline has moved up to 250 meters offshore due to significant land uplift. pic.twitter.com/XpxBMLRTUU

— Nahel Belgherze (@WxNB_) January 4, 2024

The images also show significant land uplift at more than 10 points along the coast.

"The earthquake that struck Japan's Noto peninsula on Monday was so strong that the coastline has moved up to 250 meters offshore due to significant land uplift," Mr Belgherze, an electronics technician from France, said in his January 4 post on X.

The accompanying GIF from the location shows before and after scenes of the Noto Peninsula - the epicentre of the earthquake - before the New Year's Day and after the tsunamis had subsided.

The photos in the GIF clearly show an areas where the ground level has risen, exposing land that had previously been under water.

"During a field investigation along the northwest coast of the Noto Peninsula, we found evidence at 10 locations, from Kaiso to Akasaki sites, of coseismic coastal uplift related to the Noto Peninsula Earthquake (M7.6)," space.com quoted researchers with the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo as saying in a statement on January 4.

"The pattern of estimated coseismic coastal uplift appears to be decreasing southward from Kaiso to Akasaki," they added.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) also captured the coastal uplift caused by the earthquake, the outlet further said.

Japan experiences hundreds of earthquakes every year, though most cause no damage because of strict building codes in place for more than four decades.

But many structures are older, especially in rapidly ageing communities in rural areas like Noto.

The country is haunted by the monster quake of 2011 that triggered a tsunami, left around 18,500 people dead or missing, and caused a nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima plant.