Background
Mogi, Kiyoo was born on December 28, 1929 in Kahoku, Yamagata, Japan. Son of Sei-Ichiro and Taki Mogi.
茂木 清夫
Mogi, Kiyoo was born on December 28, 1929 in Kahoku, Yamagata, Japan. Son of Sei-Ichiro and Taki Mogi.
Bachelor degree, University Tokyo, 1953. Doctor of Science, University Tokyo, 1962.
He is regarded as Japan"s foremost authority on earthquake prediction and is a former chair of the Japanese Coordinating Committee for Earthquake Prediction (CCEP). Mogi is also a former Director of the University of Tokyo"s Earthquake Research Institute, was a professor at Nihon University and is professor emeritus at Tokyo University. Due to the seismic activity in Japan, Mogi has also taken an interest in safety of nuclear power in Japan.
In 1969 Mogi predicted that there was a possibility of a shallow magnitude 8.0 earthquake in the Tōkai region of Japan, an area that has experienced a number of previous large earthquakes.
Following the passing of the Large-Scale Earthquake Countermeasure Acting, in 1978 Mogi was appointed to the newly created Earthquake Assessment Committee (EAC) for the expected Tokai earthquake, charged with warning the government if the quake was imminent. He went on to chair the Economic Commission for Africa from 1991 until he resigned the post in 1996 after failing to persuade the government of the need to take uncertainty into account when issuing warnings.
Following damage at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant due to the 2007 Chūetsu offshore earthquake, Mogi called for the immediate closure of the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant, which was built close to the centre of the expected Tōkai earthquake despite his 1969 prediction. Previously, in 2004, he had stated that the issue "is a critical problem which can bring a catastrophe to Japan through a man-made disaster".
In 1969 Mogi proposed a hypothesis for earthquake prediction, now known as the "", that major earthquakes tend to occur in an unusually seismically calm area surrounded by a ring of unusually high seismic activity.
The Mogi doughnut is one of several pattern hypotheses that have been proposed. In 1958 Mogi was responsible for a major advance in understanding the dynamics of volcanos. After studying data from several sources, he concluded that a mathematical solution developed by Yamakawa in 1955 could be used in the modelling of the deformation of a volcano caused by pressure changes in its magma chamber.
The "" (also known as the "Mogi-Yamakawa model") subsequently became the first commonly used quantitative method in volcanology, and is still widely used today.
( Fracture and flow of rocks under stress and their geoph...)
Fellow American Geophysical Union. Member Seismological Society Japan (president 1981-1982).
Married Tomoko; 1 child, Shoko.