2004 Boxing Day Tsunami

The 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami was an horrific natural disaster. On Sunday 26th of December 2004 at 7.58 am local time there was an earthquake of a massive magnitude 9 on the Richter scale. The earthquake struck off the northern tip of Sumatra in Indonesia. It was the result of the Indio-Australian Plate subducting below the Eurasian Plate. Indonesia was hit by the tsunami first. Forty-five minutes later it reached Thailand.

Tsunami- powerful seismic sea wave that begins over an ocean floor earthquake can reach 30 minutes height when approaching land and can use destruction in coastal areas.

The most noticeable difference between a tsunami and a hurricane is the cause of each. A tsunami is the aftermath of an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption. The force of the earthquake or eruption, along with the moving of the tectonic plates, sends large amounts of water in all directions. The waves can be thousands of feet high when they reach the shoreline. These giant waves can arrive at a moment's notice with no warning. The tsunami is a large natural phenomenon originating from the ocean, but it is not the only phenomenon to start in the ocean.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was one of the deadliest and most destructive in recent history. It was even catastrophic for a country like Maldives that never experienced disasters of such scale. While some of the islands in Maldives were completely destroyed and a significant number of lives lost; the damages to economy, infrastructure, environment and human psyche was immeasurable (Pardasani, 2006, p. 80). Having only dealt with storm surges and localized flooding, “there were no operational plans or capacity to deal with a disaster of this magnitude” in Maldives (Government of Maldives, et al., 2005, p. 9). Despite some organizational shortcomings, mostly owing to their lack of experience in managing large-scale disasters and limited

Throughout this unit, the Science in Practice class has been learning about natural disasters and the impact it has on humans and environment. The natural disaster that will be discussed in this report is the Boxing Day Tsunami, which occurred on the 26th of December, 2004. The tsunami took place in the Indian Ocean. Due to, two tectonics plates, the Indo-Australian plate and the Eurasian plate colliding, causing an underwater earthquake. Due to this awful disaster, people were killed, injured, diagnosed with diseases, homes and businesses were destroyed, the environment damaged.

Since these earthquakes are caused by tectonic plate movement therefore displacing the ocean floor they are almost always accompanied by massive ocean waves, sometimes reaching heights of over 100 ft and reaching speeds of 500 mph, known as seismic sea waves or more commonly known as Tsunamis4. Alongside the catastrophic events that megathrust earthquakes ensue on an affected region these colossal Tsunami waves further destruct costal lines in their path, sometimes reaching many miles inland.

1. You are placed in charge of developing an education pro- gram with the objective of raising a community’s under- standing of tsunamis. What sort of program would you develop and what would it be based upon?

Know as the second worst tsunami in the world’s history, the Boxing day tsunami took place on December 26, 2004. The tsunami destroyed over 12 different countries and islands, including Sumatra, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and many more countries located by the Indian ocean(Malcolm Moore and Meabh Ritchie). It had continued trekking counties in the Indian Ocean for over two days and left all of which were hit devastated.

The 2004 Indian Ocean and Tsunami, everyone has heard about this tragic experience before. It is the third-largest earthquake ever recorded on a seismograph and had the longest duration of faulting ever observed, between 8.3 and 10 minutes. A Tsunami is a long high sea wave caused by an earthquake, submarine landslide, or other disturbance. For the book, Wave, there was family of four where the brother, mom and dad went to Thailand to spend their winter break. The daughter had decided to spend her winter break in New York City. In Thailand, there was a Tsunami that had struck the resort where the family had been staying at. The dad and his son went out to go and help others while the mom stayed back in the hotel lobby. Or what was left of it.

The word tsunami comes from a Japanese word meaning “Long harbor waives”. Tsunami is much known and very common in Japan because thousands of Japanese have been killed and some suffered in recent centuries. Tsunami waves generally speaking cause a lot of damages such as, killing people, destroying building, and costing million of dollars. Moreover, a tsunami is a series of great sea waves caused by an underwater earthquake, landslide, or volcanic eruption. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake that is located on epicenter off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, is actually one of the worst disasters in the history of Indian Ocean that generated by the most powerful 9.0 magnitude earthquake. An aggressive

It was warm, sunny, and clear. The southern coast of Asia is filled with everything from elegant resorts to poor fishing villages and even some isolated tribes who live amongst themselves with out any outside contact. On this day fishing boats were out on the Indian Ocean and tourists many of who were vacationing from far away as Finland, Sweden and even the United States were out enjoying the water, the beaches, and hotel pools. These local fishermen, tourists, and even the hotel workers had little idea of what was to come. And what was to come was and underwater earthquake and subsequent tsunami unlike anything they had seen or heard of before. As some tourists played in the water and lay on the beaches a few of them noticed that the ocean was acting a bit strange. In some areas the normally beautiful turquoise blue ocean was turning dark. In other areas the water began to recede exposing many fish and ocean material usually not exposed as far from the beach as these were. At first many tourists and locals alike ran out to look at and collect the fish that lay exposed. For some of the local fishermen it was a windfall as all they had to do was go out and fill their baskets and sacks with fish they would normally work hours fishing to catch. They were a few people however that knew something ominous was about to happen. One tourist named Tilly Smith an eleven-year-old

For the Humanitarian Project I projected my views of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and Earthquake onto a newsletter. There were multiple sections included on the newsletter, like interviews of the survivors themselves and the effects that the crisis had on the surrounding countries. In my eyes, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and Earthquake compares to Hurricane Katrina, a category 5 hurricane that hit the United States, in many ways. It’s kind of like us United States citizens can sympathize for the people in Asia because we can compare to what they went through, even though we experienced it after. Asia experienced many conflicts going through this crisis. With a magnitude of 9.3, the quake was the second largest earthquake in history. It killed about

Waves from the beach are completely different than tsunamis since those waves are normal to see rolling in a lake or the ocean but not a tsunami. The waves you see in the ocean or lake are made by wind offshore while tsunamis are made from either an earthquake from the bottom of the ocean or a volcano in the ocean, those waves are also very small when they are compared to the gigantic waves that are called tsunamis. A single tsunami wave in the open can go up to 100 km millimeters across and that can cause a lot of damage since tsunamis waves can rise up to at least fifty feet. The size of how long a tsunami wave can cross is about one thousand American football fields which is 100 km. Like i have said before tsunami waves are gigantic and can travel very far distances, for example a tsunami wave can go about seven hundred km per hour, but when tsunamis are about a meter high if they are in the open ocean or in other words in the middle of the ocean. Once the tsunami wave gets closer to shallower areas near the coastal lines, the tsunami

A tsunami is a huge wave of water caused by vertical movements on the sea floor (Fig. 2).6 The movement of tectonic plates leads to an enormous displacement of water, creating a series of waves.6 As these waves move into shallower waters, they grow in height, eventually reaching the coast with devastating outcomes.6,7

Tsunami is a Japanese term meaning ‘harbour wave.’ They are also known as tidal waves or seismic sea waves. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are these most prevalent triggers of tsunami occurrences. What makes tsunamis not the same as normal waves is that customary whitecaps are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon or sun, or they are formed due to wind patterns. However, tsunamis are caused by a severe water displacement. While tsunamis do transpire around the world, Japan is the foremost victim of this natural disaster. Tsunamis can be over one hundred feet tall and move forward at speeds of five hundred miles per hour. An average of 7,916 people perishes each year correlated to tsunami incidents. Another 85,582 are affected. Eighty percent of tidal waves transpire in the Pacific Ocean’s ring of fire.