On March 11, 2011, at exactly 2.46pm, the earth buckled off Japan’s Honshu island, 370km northeast of Tokyo. With a magnitude of 9.0, the quake was the most powerful to ever hit Japan since records began. An hour later, the tsunami reached shore as a 46ft wave, killing more than 16,000 people and setting off one of the worst nuclear crises the world has ever seen.