See Chilling Photos From the Fukushima Exclusion Zone

No catastrophe keeps the world from spinning, but on the afternoon of March 11, 2011, it was pushed ever so slightly on its axis. The earthquake that shook Japan that day was the most powerful in the country's history — powerful enough to alter the earth's rotation, powerful enough to churn up a tsunami that killed thousands, and, for those lives proximate to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, powerful enough to halt time indefinitely.