Scorched ground and swamps of deadly radiation-infested water now cover the once-bustling towns and villages abandoned after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which happened 12 years ago today.
The catastrophe was triggered by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake that struck the shores of Japan in 2011, creating towering tsunami waves that battered the nuclear plant on the coast of Fukushima prefecture.
A tremor is thought to be around 1,000 times as strong as a 7.0, the same recording measure during the region-hammering recent earthquakes of Syria and Turkey.
