The giant (Magnitude 9.0!) earthquake that occurred off-shore Japan in March, 11th, 2011 and induced the extremely destructive tsunami responsible for the Fukushima nuclear accident was due to co-seismic slip on the interface between the Pacific and the Eurasian plates. Here is the distribution of the relative motion of the two plates along the fault, reaching up to 60m in some places (Bletery et al., JGR, 2014):
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Co-seismic slip model of the 2011 Mw9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake reconciling geodesy (static (blue) and high-rate (orange) GPS), seismology (teleseimic (purple) and accelerometers (yellow)) and tsunami (green) records. Colored curves show data fits at sampled stations (black lines are model predictions).
Here is a real time movie of the relative motion of the two plates on this interface :
The movie is derived from joint inversion of teleseimic & strong-motion seismometers, static & continuous GPS and tsunami records. Colors show the distribution of slip (in m) on the fault (Bletery et al., JGR, 2014).
Accelerated version here:Â
The earthquake was followed by a devastating tsunami. Here is a movie of the wave propagation derived from the source model above (computed with NEOWAVE (Yamazaki et al., 2009, 2011)):
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