About how the earthquake warning system works in Japan and how they were alerted to the impending 7.6 Richter earthquake that occurred yesterday, New Year’s Day, he spoke to SKAI and the show “Mismatched” the seismologist Gerasimos Papadopoulos from Japan where he is.

Mr Papadopoulos said they rang all the mobiles en masse in the shop where he was sitting just before the earthquake with a warning warning them that a big earthquake was coming, to stay calm and take cover. “After almost a minute came the strong seismic vibration and of considerable duration” said Mr. Papadopoulos.

As for how this system works he said: “In Greece, we have the experience of receiving messages from 112 for other types of dangerous phenomena, but for the earthquake, Japan is one of the few countries that has this. Once the earthquake starts, and the fault breaks, this physical process is recorded and in about 2 minutes that the seismic wave needed to reach us, the system catches up and sends an alert because it has already detected the seismic waves. But the alert precedes the earthquake because it moves at the speed of light while waves are slower” said Mr. Papadopoulos.

“It is the same system that automatically stopped all moving high-speed trains in the wider area of ​​the epicenter. This tactic has been used for the last few years and saves lives” underlined Mr. Papadopoulos and emphasized that the same is happening with natural gas. “When the system detects an earthquake, the system shuts down automatically.”

Also explaining why no big tsunami was created he said that the largest part of the fault was on land that’s why the tsunami was not big and he added that many houses in the country are still old because of that and were damaged or collapsed while new constructions are holding up although there are always exceptions.