At 2:46 p.m. on Friday, March 11, 2011, local time, . Its epicenter was about 130 kilometers east of Honshu, Japan’s main island. With a magnitude of 9.1, it was enormous, killing more than 15,000 people. Minutes later, a tsunami with waves of up to 40 meters reached land causing, among other damage, the meltdown of three of the reactors. Several highly intense aftershocks also occurred. Amid all the noise, a group of researchers detected a phenomenon never documented until now: the seismic waves it generated traveled through the interior of the planet until they bounced off the Earth’s core. As detailed in , this rebound caused Japan to move eastward.
