Text on screen — 'Viewer advice. This media resource contains content that shows images of natural disaster.' The sun rises into an glowing orange sky over the ocean. ABC's Catalyst reporter Dr Maryanne Demasi narrates.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
The Land of the Rising Sun, rich in tradition and rituals, intertwined with contemporary living.
Shot of a geisha delicately applying make-up, and then of bustling city streets.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
Japan is spoilt with mountainous landscapes and peaceful gardens.
Shot of pink blossoms in a Japanese garden. Water drips from a tree branch. A low, ominous rumbling echoes. News footage of the devastation wrought by earthquakes — fires rage, roads and buildings are collapsed, tsunamis sweep through towns.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
But it's here where Mother Nature has, for millennia, unleashed her fury, wreaking havoc — a tirade of tsunamis and earthquakes, leaving a path of destruction with little warning.
Interview with Assoc. Prof. Demian Saffer, a geoscientist from Pennsylvania State University, standing on the deck of a huge ship.
ASSOC. PROF. DEMIAN SAFFER:
There will definitely be another earthquake at some point. It's just a question of when.
A tanker-sized ship with a tall metal tower rising up from its midsection sails on the ocean.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
Aboard this vessel, I meet up with scientists working on the edge of earthquake zones. They hope they can predict when the next big one will strike.
Dr Maryanne Demasi stands on a dock as the tanker-sized ship approaches.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
In the distance is the Chikyu. An engineering marvel, it's the largest scientific drilling vessel in the world. On board are a group of international scientists who've been exploring one of the largest, most earthquake-prone regions on Earth — the Nankai Trough.
A map of the north-western Pacific Ocean shows the island of Honshu with Tokyo midway along its south-eastern coast. Lying a little further south is the Nankai Trough.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
Just 900km south of Japan's island of Honshu, the Nankai Trough lies along the Pacific Ring of Fire, where 90% of the world's earthquakes occur.
The map zooms outwards, revealing the whole Pacific Ocean. The Ring of Fire stretches all the way up from the bottom of South America's western coast, along the US and Canada, across Alaska and down through Japan and Indonesia, looping past Australia into New Zealand. Shot of the Chikyu silhouetted against the ocean's horizon.
ASSOC. PROF. DEMIAN SAFFER:
From a scientific point of view, it offers us the best chance to really understand earthquake mechanics — what causes earthquakes to happen.
A map of the north-western Pacific Ocean shows Japan straddling the Eurasian and Philippine tectonic plates.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
Japan is near the intersection of four tectonic plates. Deep beneath the ocean, in the Nankai Trough, the Philippine Plate subducts the Eurasian Plate. The movement and collision of these plates is both unpredictable and loaded with potential seismic activity.
ASSOC. PROF. DEMIAN SAFFER:
Because there's a large surface area of contact between the two plates, they generate the world's largest earthquakes. We talk about magnitude 8, magnitude 9 earthquakes — these giant earthquakes, like the Sumatra earthquake in 2004.
Footage of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami sweeping through coastal towns.
ASSOC. PROF. DEMIAN SAFFER:
The plates are moving together at some very slow rate — usually about the rate that fingernails grow — a few centimetres per year, but if the fault is kind of stuck together, then those far-field motions build up stresses around the fault zone and those stresses continue to build until they finally overcome the strength of that rock, and then it breaks catastrophically.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
In Japan, early warning systems have been in place for over a decade.
Dr Eiichiro Araki, seismologist from JAMSTEC, is interviewed in a laboratory. He speaks in heavily accented English and is subtitled.
DR EICCHIRO ARAKI:
More than one thousand sensors distributed on land and seismic wave data collected from seismometers produce the early warning of an earthquake.
Scientists examine seismic wave graphs squiggled on long, wide reams of paper stretched across the floor of an office.
ASSOC. PROF. DEMIAN SAFFER:
We are not very good at predicting earthquakes.
Interview with Dr Gary Huftile, structural geologist, in a shipboard laboratory.
DR GARY HUFTILE:
Early warning systems are very poorly effective at the moment. We're always looking for ways to do this better.
Shot of the Chikyu at sea. Text on screen — 'Nankai Trough, Kumano Basin off Kii Peninsula.'
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
The only way to improve early warning systems is to get closer to the epicentre of earthquake zones. Here, geologists sample rock layers in order to reveal secrets to the timing of the next big earthquake.
ASSOC. PROF. DEMIAN SAFFER:
The Chikyu is one of the most advanced tools that we have to study earthquakes, because it provides access to these deep parts of the fault zone that otherwise we would never be able to sample or to monitor.
Underwater footage of cylindrical equipment being lowered from the Chikyu down to the ocean floor. Shot of Maryanne Demasi standing on the helipad on the deck of the Chikyu.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
Just the sheer size of this ship catches your breath. It's over 200m long, and the total length of the drill pipe is 10km. The drill can reach the Earth's mantle, a depth no other ship of its kind has ever achieved. This Integrated Ocean Drilling Program has instruments built to survive searing heat, crushing pressures and corrosive fluids. Boreholes are subject to enormous pressure and can cave in. To prevent this, riser drilling technology uses mud within the hole instead of the usual sea water. The mud's greater viscosity helps resist the pressure.
ASSOC. PROF. DEMIAN SAFFER:
In riser drilling, one of the real advantages we have is the use of a blowout preventer. This is basically a large device — it's like a giant valve — that goes on the seabed, and actually allows us to control the pressure in the borehole and keep it stable.
An animation shows a complex device made up of barrels within a rectangular frame docking with a bore hole. Air hisses out.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
GPS-guided thrusters hold the 57,000-tonne Chikyu in position through harsh weather conditions and heaving seas.
ASSOC. PROF. DEMIAN SAFFER:
You need some way to allow the ship to move without pulling the drill pipe in and out of the ground. And that's done by this big yellow thing in the derrick.
Demian Saffer gestures towards a tower on the ship, made up of yellow-painted metal with piping along it.
ASSOC. PROF. DEMIAN SAFFER:
It's called the heave compensator, and that's exactly what it does. It acts as a giant shock absorber, so the ship can move up and down, and the pipe stays still.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
Soft rock layers are pierced by hydraulic piston corers. Sharp and tough, it takes just one second to penetrate 10m. A rotary corer is used for harder geological layers. Once collected, the samples undergo CT scans, and are analysed for density, heat conduction and sound velocity. Dr Huftile looks for active faults in the rock, to assess the size of earthquakes.
Dr Huftile examines he striations on a rock bore sample.
DR GARY HUFTILE:
And this layer is a fault that is entirely parallel to the bedding layers within the rock.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
Testing the strength of the rock reveals just how much stress the geological layers can endure before they break. To learn more about future earthquakes, scientists must look at the past. The chemical properties of geological layers also hold clues to how the Earth's climate has changed over time. To improve early warning systems, scientists will also place monitors in the boreholes to get real-time information.
DR GARY HUFTILE:
We actually have a drop in fluid pressure right before an earthquake. That's the theory. And so, by monitoring fluid pressure, it may very well be predictive.
ASSOC. PROF. DEMIAN SAFFER:
These monitoring systems are really critical to that, because being able to take the pulse of the Earth, and sense, or measure, the build-up of those stresses is a huge step toward predicting in the longer term.
Dr Eiichiro Araki is interviewed. He speaks in heavily accented English and is subtitled.
DR EIICHIRO ARAKI:
Currently we have almost no observation of the seafloor. If we have the sensors in there we can issue an early warning maybe ten seconds earlier.
DR MARYANNE DEMASI:
Currently, they can issue a 10- to 30-second warning, and another 10 seconds doesn't sound like much, but every second counts when it comes to saving lives.
ASSOC. PROF. DEMIAN SAFFER:
This research is right at the cutting edge of marine tectonics and geology. The combination of drilling deep boreholes, and the instruments that we're trying to put in, for real-time, long-term measurements, nobody else is really doing it.