OREANDA-NEWS. March 18, 2011. Images from satellites circling hundreds of miles above Earth show widespread debris and flooded coastlines from the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan last Friday.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, requested the activation of the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters, an agreement between satellite operators to provide remote sensing imagery during disasters.

A fleet of government and commercial satellites have been beaming back pictures of the catastrophe since Saturday.

Two satellites operated by GeoEye Inc. have collected dramatic images of flooded farms, inundated cities, burning debris and a train derailment in the hardest-hit region of Japan.

The Virginia-based company owns the 10-year-old Ikonos satellite and the GeoEye 1 spacecraft launched in 2008. The satellites produce images with resolutions of up to 39 inches and 16 inches, respectively.

Headquarted in Colorado, DigitalGlobe has three satellites in orbit snapping high-resolution imagery.

DigitalGlobe's satellite photos show a washed-out bridge, a decimated port and heavy damage at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Lower-resolution images from NASA's Terra and Taiwan's Formosat 2 Earth observation satellites provide a broader view showing the scale of the calamity, including the extent of the tsunami's reach inland.

The 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck Friday afternoon, local time, about 80 miles offshore of Sendai, a large city on the northeast coast of Honshu, Japan's largest island.

The jolt triggered a deadly tsunami that reached the Japanese coast minutes later, engulfing communities and leaving a wake of destruction.