Tsunami – The Killer Wave

Tsunami – The Killer WaveThe destruction caused by the tsunami on 26 December 2004 was on such gigantic scale that some seismologists compared its power to approximately, 40,000 Little Boys – the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima!It Came… It Struck… It Destroyed…While Indonesia was the worst affected, India suffered massive damages in terms of life and property. How did it happen?The earth’s surface is made up of lots of different tectonic plates and they are all moving around. Sumatra or North western Indonesia is right on a plate boundary. The plate that has the Indian Ocean on it is moving roughly north- east towards Sumatra, continuously colliding with it. Serious problems happen when one plate dives underneath the other. Force builds up gradually--- sometimes over hundreds of years---until a rupture occurs and causes an earthquake. On 26 December this happened, the plate broke and caused the earthquake. This one was one of the largest ever! It created a rupture along a fault 1000 km long and caused a vertical displacement of the sea floor thus displacing a huge volume of water---in the deep ocean it may be 5—10 mm and travel at a few thousand kilometers per hour. Even after three months, the effects were still not over---scientists say, “The Earth is still ringing like a bell which has been forcibly struck.” Immediately after the earthquake, which measured 9 on the Richter scale, US geologists said it made the Earth wobble on its axis by as much as an inch and permanently altered the map of Asia by moving some islands up to 20 m.