Is Kyushu Japan Splitting Apart? Evacuations have been ordered!

Categories: Nature

Forty-one earthquakes in 7 days show a clear pattern: the southern island of Kyushu, Japan seems to be splitting apart!

Watch this video of drone footage:  

Data from the US Geological Survey (USGS) show a very clear line of quakes from the city of Kumamoto in the west, toward Yufu and Beppu in the Oita province northeast.  

Gaping cracks, 100's of feet wide and hundreds of yards long have appeared in the ground.  The media has been calling them "landslides" but what they actually look like from the air is an enormous crack forming in the island; a crack showing the island is breaking apart.

It appears that Kyushu is breaking apart, in a similar manner to the way Shikoku broke away from the main island of Honshu as shown on the map below.

To understand what's taking place, we begin with a map of Japan to identify the islands:

Kyushu in the south, is where all of the earthquakes have taken place over the past few days. 

Here's how the USGS earthquake system recorded them:

Zooming-in toward Kyushu in the south, we get a better idea of what's been taking place:

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