Deep-sea Scientific Drilling Program To Study Volatile Earthquake Zone Launched

The Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment (NanTroSEIZE) gets underway September 21, with the Japanese drilling vessel Chikyu departing from Shingu Port with scientists aboard, all ready to log, drill, sample, and install monitoring instrumentation in one of the most active earthquake zones on Earth. The vessel's launch starts the first of a series of scientific drilling expeditions that will retrieve geological samples and provide scientific data from the Nankai Trough fault zone for the first time. Situated off Japan's southwest coast, the Nankai Trough has reliably generated large-scale earthquakes and tsunamis for millions of years, including historic earthquakes in 1944 and 1946, which measured 8.1 and 8.3, respectively, on the Richter scale...