Wow, we just had a fairly big earthquake here at 10:13am local time (GMT+0900). At first it felt like I was dizzy, then Yukari said it was an earthquake. It lasted for what I guess to be 30 seconds. Yukari’s house is designed to withstand strong earthquakes, so we were fine. The actual quake was in Nigata, which has had some big earthquakes recently. A 6.6M earthquake can do some pretty big damage, hopefully everyone in the Nigata and Nagano areas are OK.
They just showed a video camera in Nigata of when the earthquake occurred and it sure was shaking a lot. Looks pretty scary. They are saying that there is an Tsunami of 0.5 meters but it may get larger and are advising people to evacuate the area.
Updated 20:14: The earthquake was registered as a 6.6 initially, but they are now saying it was 6.8M. 6 people reported dead.
Here’s an image of where the quake was:
Hey that map you have showing the different strengths of the earthquake is very cool. Hope you guys were alright!
I found it on the JMA website: http://www.jma.go.jp/jp/quake/ Just had to resize it a bit to fit the width of my site (its a bit narrow). And yeah, we were alright, it was only a 3 on the Japanese scale over here (4M or so?)