Even for a nation inured to temblors and bracing for the Big One, last week's devastating earthquake and tsunami were beyond imagination. Experts, too, were caught off-guard. "I never thought this kind of [event] could happen" in this region, says Hiroo Kanamori, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The earthquake's astonishing power and unexpected location also expose the futility of forecasting where and when the next Big One will hit, says Robert Geller, a geophysicist at the University of Tokyo. Even in a country as extensively instrumented and thoroughly studied as Japan, he says, major quakes always "seem to be ones not expected."
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