Surviving Tsunami: Photographs in the Aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake

Viusal material including photographs and video footage documents a project in Japan in which volunteers rescued the historic photograph collections of two museums and a library in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, after the buildings were destroyed by the country's tsunami on 11 March 2011.

The catastrophic tsunami, whose waves reached heights of 40m and travelled up to 10km inland, was triggered by a massive earthquake, 8.9 on the Richter Scale. The earthquake was the most powerful ever known to hit Japan, and was the fifth most powerful earthquake in the world since modern record-keeping began in 1900. 

The Pitt Rivers Museum was founded in 1884 when Lt Gen. Pitt Rivers, one of the world's leading figures in the development of archaelogy and evolutionary anthropology, donated 18,000 artefacts as a gift to the fledgling museum. Now home to over half a million treasured objects, many donated by explorers, the museum houses one of the world's great collections.