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A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team's mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

Nonlinear dynamics is invoked to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a number of factors play a part.

One of the team, Daniel Abrams of Northwestern University, put forth a similar model in 2003 to put a numerical basis behind the decline of lesser-spoken world languages.

At its heart is the competition between speakers of different languages, and the "utility" of speaking one instead of another.

"The idea is pretty simple," said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.

"It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility.

"For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there's some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not."

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

Even if its magnitude is downgraded in the coming days, as sometimes happens as more data are analyzed, the quake will remain a benchmark in a country that has seen many major quakes. It ranks fifth on the list of biggest quakes this past century. The Indonesian earthquake that spawned 2004’s devastating Indian Ocean tsunami was a magnitude 9.1.

Japan's monster earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m. local time, about 150 kilometers off the coast of the island of Honshu. Japan is one of the world’s most prepared societies when it comes to earthquakes, and a recently established early warning system broadcast alerts in many areas, including Tokyo, before the shaking began.
Seismic activity in the region began with a magnitude-7.2 quake on March 3. Major aftershocks continue to rattle the area. The death toll is unknown.
Japan owes its lively seismic existence to its precarious geologic setting. The islands of Japan formed where one great plate of Earth’s crust, the Pacific plate, dived beneath the Eurasian and Philippine plates. The collision is part of the “Ring of Fire” of earthquake and volcanic activity around the Pacific Ocean.