The Law of Unintended Consequences

On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake rattled the ocean floor off the coast of Japan. It was the fourth largest earthquake ever recorded. It was so powerful, it moved Japan’s main island by 2.4 meters. It shifted the Earth’s axis by about 10 centimeters and sped up the planet’s rotation by a few microseconds.1

The damage from the earthquake and the tsunami it produced was biblical in scale. With only eight minutes of warning, waves swept as far as ten kilometers inland, killing thousand...