6.8 M Earthquake at the middle of the symposium

Anant Marahatta
Tohoku University
Sendai, Japan

The “Global Center of Excellence” (G-COE) program of Chemistry Department, Tohoku University, Japan had organized 4 days long int’l symposium from August 17 to 20, 2011. There were around 200 participants from the Graduate school of (Science, Life science, Pharmaceutical science and Engineering). Out of them around 20 were int’l delegates from Korea, Taiwan, Geneva, US, Germany, China, France and Canada. The symposium was divided into Oral and Poster sessions. Only selected candidates were asked to give oral presentation within 25 min. time interval.

It was the third day (August 19) of the symposium. All the events were running smoothly. All the participants were inside the auditorium hall. After the talk about “significance of metal-metal bonding to enhance the catalytic activity of binuclear complex” given by the guy from Germany, the chair person announced the 15 min coffee break. We all had a light snacks.

It was around 14.20, second half of the afternoon session was called and all the participants including Tohoku’s professors entered inside the hall. The guy from Korea was already ready for the presentation. He was from “Pohang University of Science and Technology” South Korea. He at first introduced his university and did not hesitate to tell about “how young is his university (less than 25 years, younger than him)”. His title was “Single Crystal to Single Crystal Post-Synthetic Modification via Framework Constituting Metal Ion exchange”. He was speaking about smart supramolecules with some wonderful videos and illustrations. Suddenly, the one story auditorium hall received quite strong jolt. The high tech. auditorium hall started to produce some noisy sounds (chuii, chuii….sound of glass wares). The speaker said “wow!!, what happened? ” Though this was even not became the news of the Japanese TV and radio channels, the int’l delegates were saying “Oh my god!! Is it called earthquake? What to do? Where are our host students…etc”. By chanting it, they left the hall and reached at the main entrance. The tremor was over within around 5 sec. At the middle of this scenario, the Japanese professors requested all to calm down by announcing not to scare, it’s not a big quake. The speaker started to talk after about 1 min disturbance. My eyes were looking towards the guys from US and Germany. They had made their face horrified. They were talking each other about that tremor. Anyway, the schedule of that day was completed successfully.

I was asked to follow them in excursion on 20 Aug. On that day, they shared about their initial thoughts raised (due to the March 11, 9 M quake) before finalizing the Tohoku’s invitation. If they were correct, they used to think “what to do if earthquake occurred at the middle of the symposium”.

What a coincidence? Isn’t it? They must have got nice experience.