Natural Disaster, Japan Earthquake | featured news

A tide of bodies washed up along Japan's coastline, crematoriums were overwhelmed and rescue workers ran out of body bags as the nation faced the grim reality of its mounting humanitarian, economic and nuclear crisis Monday after a calamitous tsunami....

Last week's earthquake in Japan could lead to insured losses of nearly $35 billion, risk modeling company AIR Worldwide said, making it one of the most expensive catastrophes in history.

The massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake that shook Japan and triggered a powerful tsunami on Friday has had a profound effect on both the surrounding terrain and the planet as a whole. Dr. Daniel McNamara, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told The Huffington Post that the disaster left a gigantic rupture in the sea floor, 217-miles long and 50 miles wide.

The last-ditch move indicates that the backup cooling system in a second quake-damaged reactor has failed. Japanese officials say radiation levels at another reactor being pumped with seawater have fallen, but hydrogen gas is building in a third.

Fifteen members of China’s International search and Rescue Team took off for Japan Sunday morning to help its neighbor clean up from one of its biggest natural disasters in a generation, the Xinhua news agency reports.

Google on Saturday released its first satellite images of Japan since the devastation that followed a massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit the island nation Friday afternoon local time.

The tsunami warnings have been lifted, and California coastal communities damaged by Friday's waves were assessing the damage to harbors and boats this morning.

Navy ships, Marine forces and non-governmental relief teams are being dispatched to the disaster-stricken areas of Japan to provide humanitarian assistance and to search for survivors.

In the coastal Miyagi prefecture town of Minamisanriku, 9,500 people out of the population of 17,000 are unaccounted for, according to Kyodo News. We could hear many more stories like that in the next few days. The overall picture of the destruction remains patchy, with rescue workers unable to reach some of the worst-hit areas due to wrecked roads and tsunami warnings.

A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain.