Tsunamied...

Its really heart-rendering...

A staggering magnitude of 8.9 on the Richter Scale, walls of water more than two stories high across the Bay of Bengal, slamming into coastal communities 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) away, Sumatra struck by a series of powerful aftershocks, hours after the quake.

The following is compiled from CNN and eweek...

The Destruction ....

The toll right now is 4300 for India and running .. .another 500 fishermen still missing and thats still a conservative estimate...
Some 8,800 people killed in India and Sri Lanka alone... Total count till now 13000


First step ... Join the watchdogs ..

A) An international warning system started in 1965, administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Member states include all the major Pacific rim nations in North America, Asia and South America, was well as the Pacific islands, Australia and New Zealand. It also includes France, which has sovereignty over some Pacific islands, and Russia.

b) However, India and Sri Lanka are not members because tsunamis are much less frequent in the Indian Ocean. Tho Thailand belongs to the international tsunami warning network, its west coast does not have the system's wave sensors mounted on ocean buoys. The instruments are very expensive and countries like Thailand and Sri Lanka might not have the money to buy them. They are no tidal gauges. There are no buoys present in the Indian Ocean.

c) The warning system analyzes earthquake information from several seismic networks, which is fed into computer models that model how and where a tsunami might form. It dispatches warnings about imminent tsunami hazards, predicts how fast the waves are traveling and their expected arrival times in specific geographic areas. As the waves rush past tidal stations in the ocean, bulletins updating the tsunami warning are issued. Other models generate "inundation maps" of what areas could be damaged, and what communities might be spared.

Not all earthquakes generate tsunamis. The warning center typically does not issue warnings for earthquakes below magnitude 7.0, which are still unusually powerful events


Some facts ...

a) A tsunami is not a single wave, but a series of traveling ocean waves, generated when geologic forces displace sea water in the ocean basin. The bigger the earthquake, the more the Earth's crust shifts and the more seawater begins to move.
b) Most are triggered by large earthquakes but they can be caused by landslides, volcanoes and even meteor impacts.
c) Waves typically radiate out in directions opposite from the seismic disturbance. Tho most tsunamis occur in the Pacific because the ocean basin is rimmed by the Ring of Fire, a long chain of the Earth's most seismically active spots .
d) A single wave in a tsunami series might be 160 kilometers (100 miles) long and race across the ocean at 1,000 km/h (600 mph). When it approaches a coastline, the wave slows dramatically, loses its power due to the friction.. but it also rises to great heights because the enormous volume of water piles up in shallow coastal bays.


This can happen again ..

Indonesia comes in between the Eurasia and the Australia tectonic plates.. Any seismic activiy will almost always affect Indian and Sri Lankan shores..

The fault line was deep off the Sumatra coast, running north and south for about 600 miles or as far north as the Andaman and Nicobar islands deforming the sea floor all the way along this rupture, and initiated the tsunamis. Analysts talk about a 10 - 30 m vertical shift in the plates.. over a 600 miles shelf... thats huge..

In a tsunami, waves typically radiate out in directions opposite from the seismic disturbance. In the case of this quake, the seismic fault ran north to south beneath the ocean floor, while the tsunami waves shot out west and east. Hence.. India Sri Lanka or even Somalia came under its range




The Local Tamil channels show far more gruesome and horrifying images the the DD channels or BBC.. I hope the Govt. can bring relief to all those who have been injured.. or have lost their loved ones.. are without homes and have lost their source of living...