Strong earthquake strikes off Japan

(CNN) -- A major earthquake struck off Japan's northeastern coast Sunday, prompting tsunami advisories that were later canceled, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said.

Small tsunamis were observed along the coast, measuring between 10 and 20 centimeters, said the JMA.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage, according to the Japanese news agency Kyodo.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake struck at 10:57 a.m. at the epicenter, about 130 miles east of Sendai.

The earthquake was more than 20 miles deep and had a magnitude of 7.0, the USGS said.

The JMA measured the magnitude of the quake at 7.1.

Tsunami advisories were issued -- and then canceled --for the coastal regions of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima. The areas were among the hardest hit by this year's devastating earthquake and tsunami.

Officials in Ofunato, a city in Iwate, advised residents to evacuate.

The JMA, immediately after the quake, forecast the height of the tsunami could reach half a meter (about 20 inches).

No immediate abnormalities were reported at nearby nuclear facilities, according to Kyodo.

Three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered meltdowns after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northern Japan. The tsunami swamped the plant and knocked out cooling systems that kept the three operating reactors from overheating, leading to the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

Tremors from Sunday's quake were felt as far away as Tokyo.

"It's just a continuing of the aftershocks of that devastating 9.0," said Dale Grant, a geophysicist with the USGS, referring to the March quake. "These kinds of aftershocks are likely to occur for some time."

CNN's Yoko Wakatsuki contributed to this report.

CNN

Earthquake rattles northern Chile (AP)

SANTIAGO, Chile – A 6.5-magnitude earthquake rattled a sparsely populated area of northern Chile on Monday, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

The quake's epicenter was located about 55 miles (90 kilometers) west of Calama in northern Chile, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The earthquake at 12:35 p.m. local time (12:35 p.m. EDT; 1635 GMT) lasted about a minute and was felt most strongly in northern cities including Iquique, Alto Hospicio and Pica.

In the port city of Iquique, some people fled from shaking buildings into the streets, but there were no reports of victims or damage, state television reported.

Chile's national emergency office said no emergencies were reported related to the quake.

The Chilean navy's oceanography service said that the quake did not pose any threat of triggering a tsunami.

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9 final NZealand earthquake victims declared dead (AP)

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – Nine final victims of New Zealand's devastating earthquake were declared dead Monday, ending an agonizing wait for families of people whose remains have never been identified in the wreckage.

Even DNA testing proved unable to identify nine of the 181 victims killed in parts of the city of Christchurch that were ruined in the Feb. 22 quake, so the government set up a special coroner's inquest to examine other evidence.

Chief coroner Neil MacLean made his official finding of death for nine missing people who have not been located and whose mobile phones, bank accounts and passports have not been used. He concluded they died from traumatic injuries as a result of the quake.

MacLean said their families deserved closure. The nine were six women and three men. Four were Chinese and one Filipino. Others were born in Peru and Russia.

Witnesses reported seeing all nine in the Canterbury Television Building before the earthquake, but no one had seen any of them since. A total of 115 lives were lost in the CTV building, which totally collapsed and burned.

The magnitude 6.3 earthquake is one of New Zealand's worst disasters. Some 10,000 houses and nearly 1,000 downtown commercial buildings will have to be demolished and some parts of suburban Christchurch likely will have to be abandoned altogether.

The quake is New Zealand's most expensive natural disaster, costing an estimated $15 billion.

Police earlier identified 172 victims and told the inquest they had names for another nine people but any remains of them recovered were too incomplete to be identified forensically.

Fingerprints, dental remains, pathological examinations and DNA analysis were among the methods unable to identify the nine, Detective Inspector Paul Kench said.

"To say that this is an extraordinary type of inquiry is an understatement," MacLean told the hearing.

The six women MacLean ruled dead were: Jinyan Leng, 30, Xiujuan Xu, 47, Didi Zhang, 23, and Xiaoli Zhou, 26, of China; Rhea Mae Sumalpong, 25, of the Philippines; and Elsa Torres De Frood, 53, a Peru-born New Zealand resident.

The men were: Matthew Lyle Beaumont, 31, and Shawn Lucas, 40, of Christchurch; and Valeri Volnov, 41, a Russian-born New Zealand resident.

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Five U.S. nuclear reactors in earthquake zones

By Mark Ralston, AFP/Getty Images

Aerial view of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant which sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California, is an at-risk reactor like those in Japan.

EnlargeCloseBy Mark Ralston, AFP/Getty Images

Aerial view of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant which sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California, is an at-risk reactor like those in Japan.

The at-risk reactors are the Diablo Canyon Power Plant and San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in California; the South Texas Project near the Gulf Coast; the Waterford Steam Electric Station in Louisiana; and the Brunswick Steam Electric Plant in North Carolina.

They appear in an analysis by the mapping and geographic data firm ESRI Inc., based in Redlands, Calif. The online map, the first of its kind to let the public search potential danger zones by address, includes U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS) seismic information and earthquake history for every nuclear plant in the USA.

After the Fukushima disaster, President Obama ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to evaluate the earthquake risk of every nuclear plant in the nation, said Victor Dricks, an NRC spokesman. Dricks said NRC regulations require companies that build nuclear plants to take into account local seismic history and fortify the plants against the largest quake that is likely to occur.

Dricks said the U.S. has taken proper precautions to ensure the safety of its plants. San Onofre, for instance, is built to withstand a magnitude-7.0 earthquake within 5 miles of the site, he said. In addition, the plant is 30 feet above sea level and has a reinforced concrete sea wall that is 30 feet tall and could withstand a 27-foot tsunami.

Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant suffered major damage from a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and 46-foot tsunami that hit March 11. The disaster triggered nuclear radiation leaks and an extensive evacuation in the region around the plant, which was built to withstand a 19-foot tsunami.

The ESRI map aims to help Americans determine their risk. It allows users to plug in their location and find the five nearest nuclear plants.

INTERACTIVE MAP: Find out how close you are to a nuclear plantUsers can also determine whether they live within 10-mile or 50-mile U.S. evacuation zones of any nuclear plants and whether the region around the plant has been jolted by any major earthquakes, measuring magnitude-7.2 or higher, in the past 30 years.

"All of the earthquakes on this map are significant," said ESRI analyst Bronwyn Agrios, noting that the analysis was eye-opening for those on ESRI's staff. "We found that we're just on the cusp of the evacuation zone of the San Onofre plant, just down the coast on the ocean side. Right around our area there have been three earthquakes. We're in a highly dense area for faults. We can feel that. We can feel tremors every week."

William Leith, acting associate director for natural hazards at the USGS, said it's impossible to predict the precise timing, location and magnitude of an earthquake, in part because quakes have been measured in the USA only for a century.

Although most nuclear plants are in the central and eastern USA, where earthquakes are rare, the USGS ranks 39 states as having a high or moderate earthquake risk, Leith said. New studies have shown that at least 20 magnitude-9.0 earthquakes have struck off the coast of Northern California, Oregon and Washington in the past 20,000 years, most recently in 1700, he said.

"We don't want to alarm anybody," he said, "but it can happen here."

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