8. Fukushima disaster: The 2011 Japanese earthquake was a disaster on a near-unprecedented scale.
A magnitude 9.0 quake was followed by a devastating tsunami, which was in turn followed by possibly the worst nuclear accident in history.
It was exactly the sort of catastrophe that no one could have predicted.
No one, that is, but Koji Minoura.
Twenty years before a gigantic wave sent the Fukushima reactor critical, Minoura was investigating a reference in an ancient poem to a tsunami in Northeast Japan.
Digging through historical records, he uncovered the Jogan Event—an earthquake and tsunami that killed 1,000 people in A.D. 869.
By the late 1980s, he had traveled to the site and uncovered some startling evidence that this part of Japan got routinely flattened by a tsunami every 1,000 years or so.
And the next one was way overdue.
Over the next 20 years, Minoura produced a flurry of work warning about the inevitable annihilation of the Fukushima area.
His articles made it into magazines, periodicals, and journals—all of which were completely ignored.
Two years after his predicted tsunami hit, parts of Japan are still in ruins and the reactor still poses an immediate danger.
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