By many measures, the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that shook Japan a year ago was a record-breaker. It was the largest quake in the country’s written history, the trigger for the worst nuclear accident in 25 years and the costliest natural disaster ever.
Amid such superlatives, it’s easy to forget one more: During the Tohoku-oki quake, the seafloor off Japan’s coast wrenched itself farther apart than scientists had ever measured along any seafloor.
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