Damage in the Tohoku region following the earthquake and tsunami. The Nippon refinery is on fire
This is one of a series of articles about the Japan earthquake in this issue. Here Professor Petley explains the physical geography behind the Sendai disaster
The surface of the Earth is formed from continental-scale tectonic plates that are able to move. The rates at which they actually move are slow — typically just a few centimetres per year, barely faster than the rate at which our fingernails grow — but these movements are enough to generate the devastating earthquakes that we occasionally experience. The various islands that form Japan have been created by a collision between four tectonic plates (Figure 1).
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