ground displacements of the Sendai / Tohoku-Oki earthquake (Japan)

Impressive video of the ground motions during Japan's earthquake. Horizontal motion in blue (left panel) and vertical component in red (right). The movie shows the displacements due to the M9.0 and M7.9 earthquakes in Japan on March 11, 2011 (data, no model!). Each dot/arrow represents a continuous high precision GPS station of which more than 1200 are distributed throughout Japan in a network called GEONET. According to the author (Grapenthin, Alaska Univ.) this is an absolutely unique instrumentation density found nowhere else on the world.

You can distinguish body and surface waves, dynamic slip, and static displacements. Further details and higher resolution video for download at: http://gps.alaska.edu/ronni/sendai2011.html

Visualization: R. Grapenthin, Geophysical Institute, Univ. Alaska Fairbanks.
Data: preliminary GPS positioning solutions provided by ARIA/HPL/Caltech (ftp://sideshow.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/usrs/ARIA). All original GEONET RINEX data were provided to Caltech by the Geospatial Information Authority (GSI) of Japan.

Original scientific paper:

Grapenthin, Ronni; Freymueller, Jeffrey T.
The dynamics of a seismic wave field: Animation and analysis of kinematic GPS data recorded during the 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake, Japan (from 0530 - 0630 UTC)
Geophys. Res. Lett., Vol. 38, No. 18, L18308
http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2011GL048405
22 September 2011