Deadly Japanese earthquake study retracted over false data

Authors of a study in Science analysing an earthquake that struck Kumamoto in southern Japan in 2016 have retracted their paper, following a university investigation that found it contained falsified data and manipulated images. The paper, published in November 2016, purported to show that Mount Aso, one of the world’s largest active volcanoes and situated roughly 30 kilometres northeast of Kumamoto City, had halted the rupture zone of a magnitude-7.0 earthquake on 16 April, and prevented it from spreading further and causing more damage than it did. The paper’s data and figures showed a 40-kilometre-long rupture zone that ended inside Mount Aso’s caldera, a depression that forms when a volcano collapses in on itself, and at a depth consistent with the volcano’s magma chamber.

Source: www.nature.com