Apocalypse When?

Newton is Japan’s equivalent of Scientific American. The June issue (now almost off the newstands here) helps anxious Japanese better understand the historical patterns of seismic activity across their country, where those quakes have occured, and tries to establish a non-hysterical sense of when other large magnitude quakes like the one on March 11 might happen.

But this artist’s rendering of “the big one” in which the epicenter is Tokyo — clearly a worst case scenario — does not help calm nerves. Is this hell on earth?