national TOKYO
Claims that the recent magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck southwestern Japan was manmade have been spreading online, with experts dismissing the theory as unrealistic in technological, financial and practical terms.
On July 28, the day the deadly earthquake hit Kumamoto Prefecture, a user on X who has previously shared false claims about earthquakes wrote that the "seismic wave is of an explosion, not a quake" in a post that has had around 3 million views as of Wednesday.
Searches of X posts mentioning an "artificial earthquake" in Japanese using an analysis tool from U.S. firm Meltwater showed hundreds of references tracked in the days before the quake. They surged to about 10,000 on the day of the disaster and around 38,000 on the following day.
While many posts refute the claims, assertions of a manmade origin to the disaster continue to be posted daily with tens of thousands of mentions.
The Seismological Society of Japan created a section in its website's FAQ in March to address the issue. It describes the concept as "unrealistic."
The Kumamoto earthquake struck at a depth of 16 kilometers.
Drilling a hole 10 km or deeper, the society's explainer notes, would take considerable time and be very costly and there would be many difficulties in producing the energy required to create the temblor.
While major tremors have been caused by nuclear tests, the society said the technology needed to carry out a nuclear explosion at the bottom of a deep...
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