Earth shifted its axis by almost four inches when the great magnitude 8.9 earthquake rocked the northeast coast off Japan on Friday and spawned inundating tsunami that killed hundreds and destroyed millions worth of properties.

According to a report by the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, the powerful tremor moved the planet on its axis while an analysis furnished by the US Geological Survey (USGS) over the weekend showed that the main island of Japan was also pushed by eight feet.

USGS geophysicist Kenneth Hudnut said that the agency had observed that one of its GPS has been moved following the quake while a map from Geospatial Information Authority has shown that "the pattern of shift over a large area is consistent with about that much shift of the land mass."

Experts said that the Friday quake was the most powerful so far in Japan's recorded history and the energy it emitted triggered tsunami that brought up to 30-foot walls of water to the east coastlines of Japan, sweeping with it boats, cars and houses far into the inland of the Miyagi prefecture.

Reports broadcasted by Japan's NHK state TV said that the debris picked up by the rushing and whirling waves reached as far as six miles from the Miyagi shorelines.

The USGS said that the earthquake was caused by a rupture on Earth's crust, which the agency said covers an area of 250 miles long and 100 miles wide, while tectonic plates slid by about 18 meters.

Also, Jim Gaherty of the LaMont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University has determined that the great Japan earthquake surpassed by hundreds of times the devastating tremor that struck Haiti last year.

While the Indonesian quake in 2004 was measured at more than magnitude 9, the power it created was almost identical, according to Gaherty, noting that the earlier quake also pushed gigantic waves along the coastlines located in the Indian Ocean, which caused more than 200,000 fatalities from a number of countries in the region.

Experts said that the overwhelming casualties that resulted from the 2004 quake were largely due to the unpreparedness by the countries swamped by the tsunami waves at that time as Gaherty stressed that "we didn't really have a very sophisticated tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean basin at the time so the damage was significantly worse."

Speculations also abound on whether the magnitude 6.3 earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand a couple of weeks earlier, causing considerable casualties and damages, was connected to the disastrous quake on Friday yet the great distance separating the two tremors pointed to slim possibility that they were related, according to experts.

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