YouTube spotlight: silent CCTV footage shows destruction in Japan

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A weekly spotlight on the top viral videos on www.youtube.com over the past week.

With the ongoing and tragic events in Japan over the past week, YouTube has been inundated with both amateur and professional video footage.

The most watched of these videos is " Japan earthquake: CCTV video of tsunami wave hitting Sendai airport." Uploaded by news channel Russia Today, the video, as of March 18 11am GMT, had attracted 12,719,755 views in one week.

The silent 57-second video shows dramatic footage of water sweeping across the airport causing what looks like a plane to begin to float downstream.

YouTube is just one of the mediums in which people from around the world are expressing their grief and informing others of events in Japan, "#japan," "#prayforjapan" and "#fukushima" are just some of the hashtags related to Japan that have been trending on Twitter since the tragedy struck.