Mount Fuji has a crack approximately 66 feet long, caused by a magnitude-6.2 earthquake that hit many Japanese coastal cities on March 15 last year—four days after the giant quake and tsunami in the northeast—local authorities recently revealed.
Shomei Yokouchi, the governor of the Yamanashi Prefecture where Mount Fuji is located, told reporters at a briefing that Mount Fuji isn’t likely to erupt.
The crack was described as several centimeters wide and is now buried under dirt and pebbles, according to the briefing, and it was likely caused by tremors in the earth from the quake. The governor also named landslides as a possible cause.
Yokouchi told reporters that they will do further research and take measurements over time to see if the size changes. If so, then it means the ground is unstable.
“Nothing has happened after more than a year [since the discovery of the crack], so Mount Fuji is probably not going to erupt,” Shigeo Aramaki, head of the Yamanashi Institute of Environmental Sciences, who inspected the crack last year in June, told the Japan Times.
A new fault line was discovered on Mount Fuji last May that has the potential for a magnitude 7.0 quake if triggered, according to a University of Tokyo three-year study.
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