James Nachtwey, an award-winning photographer for TIME who has spent years documenting the ravages of war, was awed by the destruction caused by the March 11 earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan and the cataclysmic tsunami it spawned. "The scale of this is beyond belief. It's apocalyptic," he said after visiting Japan in the quake's aftermath. Measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, the temblor was one of the worst natural disasters in modern history, so powerful it knocked the whole planet off its axis by

a foot.

The quake and the waves it produced decimated towns and cities killing nearly 20,000 and causing hundreds of billions of dollars in financial damage. But a nuclear disaster in a plant called Fukushima proved to be the quake's most enduring aftershock, causing months of frantic emergency efforts, scares over radioactive contamination and global hand-wringing over the safety and viability of nuclear energy around the world.