Tsunami, Before and After

Unbelievable before and after shots... Post-earthquake imagery of Japan - The Official Google Blog

Be sure to click through to view the hi-res versions. Sobering.

The top before and after photos of Yuriage looked familiar to me so I looked it up. Sure enough, it is the town in the following footage that you have probably seen quite a few times now. (click for video)



The following is a shot I took of my Google Earth of the same area.


This is the 'after' picture from Google Earth...


Holy crap. I un-precisely timed the wave in the above video and measured a known distance on GE and found that that tsunami was travelling at 15 mph. Doesn't sound like much until you see what it does. A picture is worth a million words.

The only good new I can give regarding this is that as far as I can tell, the poeple residing in this area had about an hour between the quake and the tsunami hitting. Hopefully they were well drilled and knew what to do.

Here is an even more devastating before and after set from the other side of the river...

Before


After


BTW, if you have Google Earth, the links to the KML files for the imagery that I used was located in the above Google blog. If you don't have Google Earth, get it.