the killer wave - TSUNAMI

== Snipped from WASHINGTON POST:

DIYALAGODA, Sri Lanka, Dec. 27 - When the first waves rolled in, A.D. Chandaratna was mending a fishing net on the beach in front of the single-story house he shares with his wife and four children. Fearing for their safety, he did the sensible thing and evacuated them to higher ground. Then he committed what could have been a fatal mistake: He went back to take a second look.

With puzzlement but no real sense of alarm, Chandaratna said, he stood on the beach with a number of other men as the sea slid away from the shore, exposing rocks and sand for a distance of perhaps 600 feet. By the time he saw the second set of waves -- higher, foamier and angrier than the first -- it was almost too late.

Lifted off his feet by a surging tide that also knocked down the front wall of his house, made from masonry, Chandaratna was carried inland for nearly half a mile, washing over a coastal road and a set of railroad tracks before he finally regained his footing at a point where the land began to rise.

"I'm a fisherman and I know about the sea," said Chandaratna, 50, explaining the relative aplomb with which he weathered the ordeal. "I went with the water."

In countries that border the Pacific Ocean, where tsunamis are fairly common, warning systems are in place and coastal residents are instructed to heed the danger sign of a suddenly receding sea. But people on this island nation in the Indian Ocean had never experienced anything like the earthquake-driven waves that slammed its coasts the morning after Christmas, killing nearly 11,000 people. At least some of those, it now appears, unwittingly put themselves in harm's way to get a better view.

"All the sea was like a desert," said Chandaratna, still marveling at the sight of the suddenly unveiled seabed in front of his village of Beruwala. "We had never seen this happen. This was the first time."

== Snipped from NEWSWEEK, an interview with geologist Gianluca Valensise of the Italian Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology:

NEWSWEEK: Is it true that this quake shook the entire world?
Gianluca Valensise: After a major earthquake, the whole world resonates like a bell that has been struck. It lasts for several hours after the main shock. But what’s more intriguing is that a big piece of the planet’s mass has been moved around. This actually altered the axis of the earth’s rotation.

What about other events, like say the detonation of a nuclear bomb?
This quake was more powerful. It has been calculated that the energy released on Sunday was 23,000 times that of the explosion of the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima (Japan). A large portion of the earth’s crust—1,000 km (620 miles) in length by 100 km (62 miles) in width running from Western Sumatra to Myanmar—moved. And that is where they are feeling the aftershocks now.

How would you compare this quake to others of the last decade?
It’s just so much bigger. The Bam earthquake in Iran a year ago that destroyed a very vulnerable city (and killed more than 26,000) was much smaller. But this earthquake will not be famous for the shaking, it will be known for the tsunami, which is pretty unusual.

The risks of tsunamis have been greatly underestimated. A tsunami can travel 3,000 or 5,000 km (1,900-3,000 miles), in this case to regions like Somalia where people died on the beach because they had no idea that there had even been an earthquake. This is something that people will have to face in the next few years.

How fast can such a wave go?
In the open ocean, it can travel as fast as 800 kilometers (500 miles) per hour—like a commercial airplane—so it took two or three hours. This leaves time for a system to warn people, but there wasn’t one in place.

What was the most awesome about this quake?
Its biblical nature. Its biblical size. And that it spanned two continents. The effect of the tsunami was made worse by the fact that so many people live on the coast, tourism is near the coast, and airports are at low elevations. Television reports show damage largely limited to people within a few miles of the coastline. Inland there are few problems. This is a new phenomenon. If people lived 100 meters (330 feet) above the sea, there would have been few casualties.

If a quake this magnitude hit on land, how would it have been different?
First of all, on land, you wouldn’t have the tsunami. Then, depending on whether it was close to a large city, it would have destroyed it—or done nothing. In the high mountains of Tibet, there are 8.5s that change the landscape, but they don’t kill anyone. Earthquakes like the one yesterday, in a subduction zone, have a repeat time of 200 or 300 years. A subduction zone is where one plate flows under another—in this case the Indian plate flows under the Burma plate. Subduction zones have the fastest repeat times in the world.

What are the most likely spots for another monster quake or a tsunami?
The ring around Sumatra toward the east and Japan. It is where the largest tsunamis in the world strike. The region where 95 percent of the earth’s seismic activity is released and where there are the most active volcanoes is part of a band spanning from Myanmar, around Sumatra to the southeast toward the Sea of Japan, Alaska and the Western U.S., and then south toward New Zealand.

Can people in some of the world’s poorest countries really prepare for this kind of quake?
Moving away from the coastline isn’t very feasible. Tourism also has to be on the coast or people wouldn’t go. People should expect their governments to do something. If governments don’t do something, there’s no hope. The kind of poor people who were affected far from the epicenter often don’t even know what happened. It is like an ocean wave that isn’t related to anything that simply comes and kills you. You can react to a normal earthquake with its standard shaking, you can make your house stronger—and then you might survive. But this felt more like an omen.