2.30pm: Good afternoon, welcome to the latest Guardian live blog charting the humanitarian operation in Japan and the damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit north east Japan over the weekend.

• Operators of the Fukushima nuclear power plant say one of two blasts has blown a hole in the building housing a reactor. Spent nuclear fuel has since been exposed to the atmosphere. At one stage this morning radiation was leaking at a rate of 400 millisieverts per hour around the plant's No 3 reactor building, however Japanese data indicates that radioactivity levels have fallen, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

• The radiation level in Tokyo was 10 times its normal level on Tuesday evening, but there was no threat to human health, the city government said. Despite this there has been some panic buying in the city, with some retailers comparing the purchasing to the oil crisis in the 1970s. The Guardian's Tokyo correspondent, Justin McCurry, said fears are rising that if the hoarding frenzy continues it will affect the ability to deliver emergency supplies to the disaster zone.

• There has been a powerful aftershock near Shizuoka, south-west of Tokyo. Japanese television described it at "six plus" on the Japanese intensity scale, which runs from zero to seven, Justin McCurry reported. It has been described as magnitude 6.0 in the standard scale. Other media organisations report that buildings shook in Tokyo on the latest aftershock. Justin says officials have not issued a tsumani warning.

• People within a 20-30km radius of Fukushima Daiichi have been urged to stay indoors. Those within a 20km radius have been told to leave. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which operates the power plant, has pulled out 750 workers, leaving just 50. A 30km no-fly zone has been imposed around the reactors.

• Food and water are reportedly in short supply in parts of the north east. Hundreds of thousands have been evacuated in the region, with shelters packed. Rolling power blackouts are set to affect 5 million households over Tuesday night, TEPCO said.

You can read all our previous coverage from today here.

2.48pm: The earthquake being reported near Shizuoka was 6.1, according to the US geological survey. It describes the location of the earthquake as 42 km (26 miles) NNE of Shizuoka, at a depth of 1km. It occurred at 10.31pm local time (1.31pm GMT).

2.56pm: Mark MacKinnon tweets:

Another serious quake felt here in Morioka, Japan. Maybe it's the hotel I'm in, but we're swaying quite a bit tonight...

3.04pm: A representative from Japan's meteorological agency is talking about the latest earthquake. He says there is "no danger of a tsunami" but there could be "landslides and destruction of buildings". He says the depth of the earthquake was 14km.

3.08pm: Winds are dispersing radioactive material from the Fukishima nuclear power plant over the Pacific Ocean, away from Japan and other Asian countries, the World Meteorological Organisation said.

But the United Nations weather agency warned that although winds had blown nuclear particles offshore so far, weather conditions could change and it was closely monitoring satellite and other data in case the patterns shifted over land, Reuters reports.

"At this point, all the meteorological conditions are offshore so there are no implications inshore for Japan or other countries near Japan," Maryam Golnaraghi, chief of WMO's disaster risk reduction division, told a briefing.

3.18pm: The International Atomic Energy Agency has said it "remains concerned over the status of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, where sea water injections to cool the reactors in units 1, 2 and 3 are continuing". It adds:

Attempts to return power to the entire Daiichi site are also continuing. After explosions at both units 1 and 3, the primary containment vessels of both units are reported to be intact. However, the explosion that occurred at 04:25 UTC [4.25am GMT] on 14 March at the Fukushima Daiichi unit 2 may have affected the integrity of its primary containment vessel. All three explosions were due to an accumulation of hydrogen gas. A fire at unit 4 occurred on 14 March 23:54 UTC and lasted two hours. The IAEA is seeking clarification on the nature and consequences of the fire. The IAEA continues to seek details about the status of all workers, reactors and spent fuel at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.



The IAEA said all units at the Fukushima Daini, Onagawa, and Tokai nuclear power plants are in "a safe and stable condition".

3.42pm: The Japanese authorities have said they may use helicopters to pour water on reactor No. 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi power station.

They would drop water into the overheating spent fuel storage pool at the nuclear plant.

They said they would do this within two or three days to do this but did not explain why, according to Reuters.

A 19-mile no-fly zone has been placed around the plant but using helicopters would enable them to avoid the contamination risk that would come from approaching the pool directly.

4.02pm: One of the men brought in to clean up Chernobyl has strongly criticised Japan and the IAEA over the current problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Reuters reports. Russian nuclear accident specialist Iouli Andreev said a fire today, which released radiation, involving spent fuel rods stored close to reactors, looked like an example of putting profit before safety. Andreev said:

The Japanese were very greedy and they used every square inch of the space. But when you have a dense placing of spent fuel in the basin you have a high possibility of fire if the water is removed from the basin.

He said of the IAEA:

"This is only a fake organisation because every organisation which depends on the nuclear industry - and the IAEA depends on the nuclear industry - cannot perform properly.

It always will try to hide the reality. The IAEA ... is not interested in the concentration of attention on a possible accident in the nuclear industry. They are totally not interested in all the emergency organisations."

4.22pm: To those asking in the comments section about the depth of the earthquake near Shizuoka, the US geological survey was saying it was at a depth of 1km but it has now corrected it to 10km. The USGS has also upgraded the magnitude to 6.2 (from 6.1).

The Japanese meteorological agency put the depth at 14km and the magnitude at 6.4.

The USGS also says there was a 6.0 magnitude earthquake 136km (84 miles) east of Hachinohe, Honshu, at 1.23am local time (3.23pm GMT), at a depth of 9km (5.6 miles).

4.33pm: Our science correspondent Ian Sample has this summary of what options face the operators at the Fukushima 1 power station after this morning's explosion at a third reactor and the direct release of radiation into the air from a water pool used to store spent fuel rods.

Tepco, the company that operates the power station, has evacuated most of its workers and left around 50 in place who are battling to pump sea water into three unstable reactors. At the same time, they are trying to cool the spent fuel rod pool where water is reportedly at boiling point. Earlier this morning, the intense temperature of the pool was preventing workers from getting close enough to cool it. The engineers now face several issues. They have to keep pumping cold seawater into all three reactors to prevent them from overheating and potentially going into meltdown. The risk appears highest at reactor 2, where fuel rods were repeatedly exposed yesterday and this morning's explosion damaged the pressure vessel around the reactor. If the reactor is left to overheat for too long, the fuel rods could melt inside, turning the interior of the core into a molten mass. Because the containment vessel around the reactor core has been damaged, some radiation would doubtless escape. If the molten core breaches its containment completely, it will release a large amount of radiation into the air. The brief release of radiation this morning from the spent fuel rod pool, at 400 millisieverts per hour, was dangerous for the workers at the site, but levels have fallen considerably since, suggesting no major release of radiation is ongoing. The spent rods are usually covered by 10m of water, but this could boil off, exposing the fuel rods to the air. Uncooled, these spent fuel rods could catch fire and release radiation directly into the atmosphere. The amount of radiation they give off will depend on how old the rods are. Older rods are less radioactive, and so less dangerous.

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4.40pm: An update on the plan to drop water on the pour water on reactor No. 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi power station from Kyodo News (thanks to WonderingStill in the comments section for the tip-off):

The ministry began preparing to dispatch a ground self-defence force helicopter unit in Chiba prefecture, seeing that it would be possible for the helicopters to apply the same technique used for putting out a forest fire - namely, dropping water from the air. But for now, the spent fuel pool is being cooled by police and firefighters on ground, after the government judged that an aerial approach ran the risk of damaging the spent nuclear fuel underwater and exposing SDF personnel to radiation, according to Kitazawa. ''We will perform our duty when we reach the stage where (the temperature rise in spent fuel) begins to settle down and we decide to drop large amounts of water from the sky,'' he said.

4.53pm: The radiation plume from Fukushima could reach Tokyo, a US scientists' organisation has warned.The Union of Concerned Scientists said in a telephone briefing that the plume could travel hundreds of miles.

5.15pm: Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning scientist and US energy secretary, gave a cautious defence of nuclear power before a congressional committee.

According to Reuters:

Asked about the prospects for a "brake" on nuclear expansion in the face of events in Japan, Chu declined to offer a robust backing for the industry, emphasizing instead that lessons could be learned from the tragedy unfolding there. "We have to take a hard look: were there any lessons learned from this tragedy that can further improve the safety ... of our existing reactors?" he said. "It's probably premature to say anything except we will learn from this."

This is Richard Adams in Washington taking over live blogging duties.

5.34pm: Events at Fukushima have moved European governments and energy officials to plan "stress tests" on nuclear plants within the EU, after a meeting in Brussels agreed on the need to check whether the EU's 143 nuclear plants could withstand earthquakes and other emergencies.

EU Energy Commissioner Guenter Oettinger said the tests should follow "strict standards" that would be set by the second half of the year. He invited non-EU nations, including Russia and Switzerland, to join the testing programme.

5.47pm: Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has told a press conference that there was a "possibility of core damage" at Fukushima Daiichi's unit 2 reactor, adding: "The damage is estimated to be less than 5%."

Amano called the latest developments at the damaged plant "worrying".

5.54pm: The US Republicans backing nuclear power aren't about to give up the struggle because of events in Japan. Meet Republican congressman Devin Nunes of California, who wants 200 new power plants and thinks the events in Fukushima strenthens the argument for more nuclear plants:

Nunes has proposed a comprehensive energy bill that calls for 200 new nuclear power plants by 2040. The bill has more than 50 sponsors, including House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. Citing the rarity of the disaster that caused the nuclear crisis in Japan, Nunes insists the catastrophe may actually strengthen the argument for building more reactors in the United States. "As we wait to see what happens, I believe this will make the case for nuclear power in the long run," Nunes said.

California has historically also been known to have earthquakes.

6pm: The latest news on the state of each of the reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant:

• No 1: Cooling failure, partial melting of core, vapor vented, hydrogen explosion, seawater pumped in. • No 2: Cooling failure, seawater pumped in, fuel rods fully exposed temporarily, vapor vented, damage to containment system, potential meltdown feared. • No 3: Cooling failure, partial melting of core feared, vapor vented, seawater pumped in, hydrogen explosion, high-level radiation measured nearby. • No 4: Under maintenance when quake struck, fire caused possibly by hydrogen explosion at pool holding spent fuel rods, pool water level feared receding. • No 5: Under maintenance when quake struck, temperature slightly rising at spent fuel pool. • No 6 - Under maintenance when quake struck, temperature slightly rising at spent fuel pool.

6.14pm: Sensitive air monitoring equipment on the US Navy's aircraft carrier George Washington found low levels of radioactivity from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant even as the carrier sat in dock at Yokosuka naval base, a spokesman for the US Seventh Fleet has revealed.

Commodore Jeff Davis said military staff and their families at Yokosuka were being advised to stay indoors and seal their homes as much as possible.

6.33pm: The possible damage to reactor No 2's containment vessel still concerns Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, based on further comments he made to a press conference today in Vienna, via Reuters:

"Is it a crack? Is it a hole? Is it nothing? That we don't know yet," Amano said. But he said the pressure in the primary containment vessel had not fallen. "If there is a huge damage the pressure should go down."

Amano's comments were opaque, after he was asked if conditions at the plant were likely to improve or worsen. "There are mixed indications," he said.

6.48pm: Jeffrey Lewis of the Monterey Institute of International Studies points to an alarming new statement by the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan, which confirms that the fire in the No 4 reactor today lasted for around three hours:

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 reactor

• At 9:38am on March 15, a fire was discovered on the third floor of the secondary containment building.

• At 12:29pm on March 15, Tepco confirmed extinguishing of the fire.

Dr Lewis is concerned by this revelation, and writes on his blog Arms Control Wonk:

This is very bad news – yesterday, I noted this was the wildcard scenario. The radiation release was very large – detectors recorded a measurement of 400 millisieverts per hour. Milli, not micro. People can stop with the comparisons to airline flights or X-rays, unless you get your X-rays performed at DARHT. If you are scoring at home, most folks I know seem to think we are at INES 6 now, heading for 7 (and the C-word) unless Tepco catches a break.

Presumably the "C-word" here is Chernobyl. The INES is the International Nuclear Event Scale, which runs from 1 to 7 – with Chernobyl being a Level 7, meaning a "major accident" – the only one on record so far.

7.08pm: The Union of Concerned Scientists is warning that if the failure within the Fukushima Daiichi plant's containment process turns into a full-core meltdown, the resulting radiation plume could reach Tokyo.

The group said a "jerry-rigged" cooling system at the Japanese plant would be hard to maintain if all workers there were evacuated, and that experts were concerned that a larger radiation plume could travel hundreds of miles.

Radiation from a core meltdown could exit the reactor through a damaged containment vessel, the scientists said in a telephone briefing. The group called on the Japanese government to extend the evacuation zone around the nuclear plant.

7.29pm: On the question of comparing Fukushima with Chernobyl, expert Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment think tank's nuclear policy programme gave his opinion in an interview with Deutsche Welle yesterday:

So now we have the reactor shutdown generating heat from the hot fuel but no cooling systems. So that is the same basic scenario that we had in Three Mile Island. That is not the same, by any means, as the accident at Chernobyl in 1986, where because the reactor had a completely different design, the physics of the reactor produced a power excursion and that led to an explosion of the reactor under conditions in which the reactor had no containment to withstand the pressure from the blast. And we know what happened: a hole was blown out from the side of the reactor, and a large amount of the radioactive inventory from the fuel was propelled outside of the reactor building. That cannot happen here. These reactors are water-moderated. They're not graphite-moderated. There won't be any power excursion of this kind. That's just physically not possible.

7.46pm: Scare stories about the impact of the Fukushima reactor damage are coming in from as far away as Singapore.

Singapore's state-run Channel NewsAsia reported on its website that text messages have been circulating in the city-state, warning people not to expose themselves to rain as it may carry radioactive particles that can burn or even cause cancer.

8.20pm: The Guardian's Larry Elliot has a concise and clear analysis of the economic impact on Japan and the rest of the world from the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear combination:

What makes this crisis different is the nuclear dimension. The three explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant puts this incident into a different category from either Kyoto or Katrina. There has been disruption to power supplies and people have been evacuated from a 12-mile exclusion zone around the plant, but it could potentially become far more widespread unless the Japanese can shut the plant down safely and quickly. Some analysts were last night starting to imagine what might happen in the event Tokyo, with 13 million people in its metropolitan district, had to be evacuated because of a radiation cloud heading its way. The economic costs of such an event would be astronomic.

8.32pm: The two main threats to human health come from caesium-137 and iodine-131 from the radiation being carried into the area around Fukushima, explains the Guardian's science correspondent Ian Sample.

8.45pm: France's ASN nuclear safety authority says the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant could now be classed as level six out of the International Nuclear Event Scale of one to seven.

"We are now in a situation that is different from yesterday's. It is very clear that we are at a level six, which is an intermediate level between what happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl," ASN President Andre-Claude Lacoste told a news conference in Paris.

8.51pm: The Institute for Science and International Security in the US also says the state of Fukushima's reactors has worsened considerably: "This event is now closer to a level six, and it may unfortunately reach a level seven".

The ISIS said in a statement:

A level six event means that consequences are broader and countermeasures are needed to deal with the radioactive contamination. A level seven event would constitute a larger release of radioactive material, and would require further extended countermeasures. The international community should increase assistance to Japan to both contain the emergency at the reactors and to address the wider contamination. We need to find a solution together.

The ISIS has also annotated a DigitalGlobe satellite image of the Fukushima plant (above) taken on 14 March.

9pm: Japanese nuclear plant operator Tepco is considering removing panels from the No 5 and No 6 reactors at the damaged Fukushima nuclear site to prevent hydrogen build-up, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has announced.

The IAEA said in a statement: "Units 5 and 6 were shut down at the time of the earthquake ... both reactors are currently loaded with fuel," and that "plant operators were considering the removal of panels from units 5 and 6 reactor buildings to prevent a possible build-up of hydrogen in the future".

9.07pm: A sign of the times: Apple said it is delaying its launch of the iPad 2 in Japan. "We are delaying the launch of the iPad 2 in Japan while the country and our teams focus on recovering from the recent disaster," said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris.

Obviously that doesn't mean much in the scale of things.

9.15pm: A fire in the spent atomic fuel pool at Japan's stricken nuclear reactors would dramatically raise the dangers of a radiation leak, the Guardian's US environment correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg reports.

Nuclear engineers warn there is more radioactive material stored in those pools than in the reactor cores. There is also a bigger chance of radiation spreading due to fire. "If the spent fuel pool is on fire, the chances of radioactivity getting to the public are very much higher," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He said the unit 4's reactor core was emptied out into the spent fuel pool last year following a shutdown. "There is much more material there because there is at least one reactor core plus what there was to start with, and it is in a building that has a big hole in the side of it," he said. Scientists began raising concern about the possibilities of fire and radiation leak from the waste sites on Monday. Robert Alvarez, a senior policy expert at the Institute of Policy Studies, told a conference call with journalists that satellite pictures of the Fukushima plant showed evidence of damage. "There is clear evidence that the fuel cask cranes that haul spent fuels to and from the reactor to the pool both fell. They are gone," he said. "There appears to be copious amounts of steam pouring of the area where the pools is located." The damage confronts technicians with the tasks of cooling both the reactor and the fuel pools, where temperatures also began rising dangerously once the nuclear plants lost power. "The spent fuel pool in unit 4 is boiling, and once that starts you can't stop it," said Jim Riccio, a nuclear expert at Greenpeace. "The threat is that if you boil off the water, the metal cladding on the fuel rods that is exposed to the air and is volatile will catch fire. That will propel the radiation even further." A report by the National Academies of Science in 2005 warned of just such a danger. The study said the spent fuel pools put America at risk of a widespread radiation leak in the event of a terrorist attack. It went on to warn of a radiation leak travelling hundreds of miles causing up to 6,000 cancer deaths. But even that report, though dire, was not new. In the early 1990s, a number of nuclear engineers, including Lochbaum, warned about the dangerous situation of spent atomic fuel in US plants that are built along the same lines as Fukushima. The engineers called for nuclear waste to be stored instead in dry casks at a distance from the reactors. Their story made the cover of Time magazine. It did not, however, lead to any improvements in nuclear safety, Lochbaum noted. "It was a design mistake to put the spent fuel in the same building as the reactor," he said. The close proximity makes it much harder for technicians struggling to cool down the reactor and the spent fuel pool at the same time. "They are like siamese twins, you can't separate them," Lochbaum said.

9.30pm: Here's a summary of the latest events in Japan and its worsening nuclear crisis:

• Fears of a catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan escalated following a third explosion and a fire in another reactor that caused radiation to rise to harmful levels.

• France's ASN nuclear safety authority says the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant could now be classed as level six out of the International Nuclear Event Scale of one to seven.

• Japanese nuclear plant operator Tepco is considering removing panels from the No 5 and No 6 reactors at the damaged Fukushima nuclear site to prevent hydrogen build-up.

• Prime minister Naoto Kan urged the public to remain calm in a televised address, but ordered anyone still within the 20km exclusion zone to leave immediately, and the 140,000 residents within 30km to stay indoors.

• The number confirmed dead or missing by police rose above 10,000, Japan's largest death toll in a natural disaster since the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, Kyodo news agency said.

• Food and water are reportedly in short supply in parts of the north east. Hundreds of thousands have been evacuated in the region, with shelters packed. Rolling power blackouts are set to affect five million households over Tuesday night, Tepco said.

• Fears of a nuclear meltdown and concerns that disruption to Japanese manufacturing could result in global shortages of electronic components sent stock markets tumbling across the world.

• Tokyo was shaken by a late-night quake of 6.2 magnitude, but the Japanese meteorological agency said it was not an aftershock. It was centred in Shizuoka prefecture, hundreds of miles south-west and inland.

10.23pm: This is Ben Quinn in London re-opening the blog to bring you news that a fresh fire has broken out at reactor four of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

The new fire erupted early on Wednesday (JST) in the outer housing of the reactor's containment vessel, where fire fighters are trying to put out the flames.

The blaze comes after another broke out on Tuesday in the reactor's fuel storage pond, an area where used nuclear fuel is kept cool causing radioactivity to be released into the atmosphere.

11.09pm: The operator of the Fukushima plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), says fire broke out again at its No 4 reactor unit because the initial blaze – which occurred on Tuesday morning local time – was not completely extinguished, reports AP.

11.17pm: Sky News are reporting that the Japanese government has claimed the fire at the Fukushima nuclear is 'under control'. Local media reported that flames from the blaze were no longer visible.

11.23pm: Some nice detail from Tepco. A spokesman for the Fukushima plant's operator has said: "At around 0545 today, our employee carrying batteries to the control room discovered smoke billowing from the building of reactor 4 [at Fukushima Daiichi]."

11.35pm: Minoru Ogoda, a spokesman for the Japanese nuclear safety agency, tells AFP: "We have received information [from Tepco] that the fire and smoke is now invisible, and it appears to have gone out of its own accord."

11.43pm: The fire in reactor 4 has now been brought under control, the Japanese government is now saying, according to the AFP news agency.

It reportedly took hold because the fire on Tuesday morning (JST) was never properly extinguished.

11.55pm: The Guardian's Jonathan Watts has filed a report on the situation in Ishinomaki, in Miyagi prefecture, where local authorities in the town estimate that 10,000 out of a population of 160,000 may have died in the tsunami last Friday:



Local schools have become morgues, but despite the low temperatures the bodies cannot be kept for long in these temporary facilities. The local government is considering mass burials. The immediate concern, however, is for the living, who are desperately short of essentials, particularly food and fuel. The central government has dispatched troops and pledged to send extra volunteers and food supplies. In Ishinomaki, the food has to be transported by helicopter to a nearby football stadium. But the relief operation does not appear to match the scale of a disaster still not properly understood. "What we have been given so far is not enough," said Kitamura. "Our needs are enormous. People have lost their homes. They will be here a long time." Getting supplies to the area is difficult. The regional refinery at Shioyama has burned down so oil will have to come from further afield. But the pressure on limited supplies is intense across the country. According to the state media, the hauliers' association has asked the government to tap the country's oil reserves because they are currently able to deliver only 60% of the normal amount of fresh produce. Most petrol stations in Miyagi have closed. Cars are queueing for hours at the dwindling number that still have fuel, but they are limited to about seven litres.

12.28am: Social networking sites became a lifeline for many in the wake of Friday's earthquake and tsunami, according to the Japan Times.

It reports that on Japan's main social networking site, mixi, a number of communities were set up soon after the quake to keep people informed. The largest one now has over 300,000 members and features guides to communities by region and purpose.

There are also some interesting insights into how Twitter was used, for example among office workers who found themselves isolated in central Tokyo:

A lot of assistance was offered over Twitter by stores, restaurants, campuses and even people in houses along main roads who tweeted that help was available. Twitter even set some official hashtags to help identify your tweet, such as #jishin (general earthquake information); #j_j_helpme (requests for rescue or other aid); #hinan (evacuation information); #anpi (confirmation of safety of individuals, places, etc.); #311care (medical information for victims). And although it is not official, #jishin_e seems to be used for English, too.

1.51am: Here is a summary of events over the past 24 hours:

• Fears of a catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan escalated following a third explosion and a fire in another reactor that caused radiation to rise to harmful levels.

France's ASN nuclear safety authority says the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant could now be classed as level six out of the International Nuclear Event Scale of one to seven.

• Prime minister Naoto Kan urged the public to remain calm in a televised address, but ordered anyone still within the 20km exclusion zone to leave immediately, and the 140,000 residents within 30km to stay indoors.

Although officials said that health risks to anyone further than 13 miles from the plant were minimal, the escalating problems have diminished public confidence.

• The number confirmed dead or missing by police rose above 10,000, Japan's largest death toll in a natural disaster since the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, Kyodo news agency said.

Tokyo was shaken by a late-night quake of 6.2 magnitude, but the Japanese meteorological agency said it was not an aftershock. It was centred in Shizuoka prefecture, hundreds of miles south-west and inland.

• Food and water are reportedly in short supply in parts of the north east. Hundreds of thousands have been evacuated in the region, with shelters packed. Rolling power blackouts are set to affect five million households over Tuesday night.

• Global stock markets fell sharply on Tuesday as the panic gripping Japan in the wake of its catastrophic earthquake and tsunami spread around the world.

The falls came despite the Japanese government pumping another ¥5.4 trillion (£42bn) of emergency cash into the market. It follows Monday's unprecedented £165bn emergency funding.

We are going to wrap this blog up now but you can follow all the latest on events in Japan on our new live blog here.