High chance of magnitude-7 or higher quake in Japan in coming days

As Japan scrambles to pick up the pieces from Friday's magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami, the Kyodo news agency is reporting that there is a 70% chance of a magnitude-7 or greater quake taking place in the next three days.

Kyodo also reports that there is a 50% chance of one hitting in the three days after that.

Japan's largest earthquake on record may have knocked the planet 3.9 inches off its axis as one crustal plate slid beneath another, Eric Fielding, a principal scientist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Bloomberg news agency.

Japan is part of the so-called Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines surrounding the Pacific Basin that includes Sumatra, the site of the Indonesian earthquake, Bloomberg reports.

Antonio Piersante, head researcher of the Italian Institute of Geology and Vulcanology, based in Rome, told Bloomberg that we could see more major activity in this part of the world.

"After the Sumatra event and especially after this last event maybe we should seriously consider the possibility that any part of the Ring of Fire could generate a 9-plus earthquake," Piersanti told Bloomberg in an e-mail.

Before March 11, the magnitude-9.1 quake that hit northern Sumatra in 2004 caused plates beneath the ocean to rupture, and was blamed for an aftershock nearly three years later that caused hundreds more deaths, Bloomberg reports.