Posted on behalf of Ichiko Fuyuno.
The devastating earthquake in northern Japan last Friday hit major universities and research institutions hard, both those near the epicentre and elsewhere, bringing many activities to a halt which could last for weeks, or even months. Although it appears to be a huge setback across all fields of science, the damage was limited to research equipment, and no casualties of researchers or staff have been so far reported.
The most badly affected is Tohoku University in Sendai, the major city closest to the epicentre. The university, one of the top 5 in Japan, will be completely closed until late April, and part of the university-entrance examination, which was scheduled for later this month, will be postponed. Electricity. telephone lines and computer servers are gradually recovering. None of the buildings collapsed, although some had cracks and damaged walls.
The university has set up an emergency team to assess the degree of damage, but it will take at least a few days to find out the overall picture.
“At this moment, it is impossible to tell in a calm manner about the degree of damage, but we’ve lost many valuable devices and experimental samples due to the complete outage, big tremors and broken equipment,” says Masayuki Yamamoto, dean of the university’s School of Medicine. Many labs have apparently lost samples stored in deep freezers due to power cuts, but there are no reports that animals or microbes were released from the School of Medicine. Many medical students are spending nights at evacuation centers and enduring hard times, he says.
Tohoku University’s WPI- Advanced Institute for Materials Research (WPI-AIMR) also witnessed immense damage on experimental devices, especially on higher floors of its new building. Taro Hitosugi, a physicist specialized in surfaces and interfaces, says the cost of the damage could amount to a few hundreds of thousands of dollars in his lab alone, including costly turbo-molecular pumps and measurement equipment.
Most of students are leaving Sendai for their hometowns, because the supply of food and gasoline is extremely limited, and there are still aftershocks and intermittent power outages. Some researchers have yet to contact their parents. “Given such a situation, I cannot feel like resuming our research,” Hitosugi says.
Yoshinori Yamamoto, head of the WPI-AIMR, told its researchers on 15 March to prioritize getting their own lives in order because it will take a long time to recover the functions of the university.
Following the troubles at the nuclear reactors in Fukushima, the electricity supply has been extremely limited, so almost all research equipment is turned off except for connections to computers in and outside Sendai such as the University of Tokyo. Students have been asked to stay home.
Suspended large-scale experimental facilities include accelerators at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), in Tsukuba and the Earth Simulator supercomputer at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) in Yokohama. “The biggest concern is how long it would last,” says a researcher at the University of Tokyo. “But the suspension of individual research is not the most important thing. We have come to the point where we discuss how to reconstruct our own country.”
Image: Damaged equipment in Taro Hitosugi’s lab at Tohoku University.