Causes And Effects Of The Indian Ocean 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.

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.

The Tsunami that took place after the initial quake was caused by a portion of seabed rupturing upwards, and displacing a large portion of the water being displaced. This water traveled at 450 miles, at 8 feet tall, to the Chilean and Peruvian coast. Early viewers of the tsunami later reported waves being up to 10 feet tall. This rupture was believed to be caused by 2 unusually dense pieces of seabed that had been previously undetected by scientists, and consequently caused a large displacement of water. There were also small ruptures of seismic

Tsunamis are usually caused by tectonic displacement of the ocean floor often resulting in an underwater earthquake. This happened on Boxing Day in 2004 in the Indian Ocean where there was a 1000km thrust fault from a release of stress along the constructive-destructive plate boundary. No technology was in place to detect such a disaster and, although scientists knew a tsunami was likely to hit Southern Asia, most of the warnings were too late and the first TV broadcasts in Thailand even happened after the waves had hit. Up to 290,000 people were killed and thousands of bodies are still missing to this day. Since this disaster, a tsunami warning system has been put in place in the Indian Ocean and technology such as this is almost guaranteed to prevent such a high death toll for the future. There is a strong argument that if such technology was implemented before 2004, then thousands of lives could have been saved through evacuation and similar measures. Technology is the best way to reduce the impacts of earthquakes because they can predict a upcoming earthquake, allowing residents of an area time to evacuate to safe land, saving many lives. However, there are many other ways of reducing the impacts of earthquakes and technology has its limitations.

All along the coast of Central America the tsunami was observed. (February 4, 1965, Alaska Earthquake, Rat Islands, Magnitude 8.7) This earthquake was recorded at a magnitude 8.7 and caused a big tsunami of over 10 m on Shemya Island. It barely caused any damage, though. Just two months after the initial shock, an aftershock earthquake at a magnitude of 7.6 hit the same area. (March 28, 2005, Sumatra Earthquake aka Nias Earthquake) Just off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, was a devastating earthquake that killed 1,300 people. A majority of the devastation occurred on the island of Nias. The massive earthquake sparked a panic around countries along the Indian Ocean because there was a massive tsunami just three months earlier in December. ( August 15, 1950, Assam, Tibet Earthquake, Magnitude 8.6) There were at least 780 people who died in this 8.6 magnitude earthquake. Many buildings completely collapsed in areas of Eastern Tibet. Landslides and ground cracks/fractures ended up washing away and entire village. The village of Yedong collapsed into the Yarlung Zangbo River and literally washed

This generated one of the deadliest tsunamis known to mankind, killing over 230,000 people and leaving over two million people displaced. The epicenter of the earthquake was located in the Indian Ocean, right off the west coast of Sumatra. The tectonic plates beneath the ocean floor had been colliding and building up pressure for hundreds of years, until this day when subduction occurred between the Indian and the Burma plates. The process of subduction displaced billions of tons of water, creating waves that traveled towards the shorelines at hundreds of miles per hour and as high as sixty to one hundred feet. There was absolutely no warning for the people of Southeast Asia, as the tsunami progressed quite rapidly. (National Geographic,

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.

From the case study above we can see that human influences were the main cause in the severity of the impact, but that’s not always the case, physical factors are just as important. This can be seen in the great Sumatra- Andaman earthquake which took place on the 26th of December 2004 and registered a 9.1 magnitude, one of the third biggest recorded quakes. The subduction of the Indo-Australian plate under the Burma plate triggered the tsunami responsible for the greatest loss of life in a tectonic event. A 15-20m slip occurred along 1600km of fault line in two phases over a period of around 3-4 minutes, the longest rupture ever recorded in an earthquake. The focus was located just 30km below sea level, which resulted in serval billion tonnes of water being displaced across

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.

In the article, ¨Indian Ocean Tsunami; Then and Now¨ by Lucy Rodgers and Gerry Fletcher the text says, ¨About 228,000 people were killed as a result of the 9.1 magnitude quake and the giant waves that slammed into coastlines.¨ Anything can happen at any time, and everybody living in that area were not expecting a tsunami to hit out of nowhere, causing 228,000 of them to get killed. On page 48, the text says, ¨For as far as Ruslan could see, Meulaboh had become a lake, clogged with floating debris.¨ Everything in the city was basically gone, all because nobody saw anything coming and nobody was prepared. Finally, on page 78, the text says, ¨A man stared at him with wide, and bulging eyes. Unblinking eyes, rigid with death. Around him were several more corpses, caught in the brush like debris.¨ Thousands people got killed and hurt, because a tsunami hit out of

An earthquake shook northeastern japan on March 11, 2011. It was a magnitude -9 earthquake so it caused a savage tsunami. The great earthquake was felt around the world from the antarctica's ice sheet and norway’s fjords. Even years later things are getting washed up on north America s beaches. 250 miles of japan’s coastline Honshu dropped almost 2 feet . The jolt moved 8 feet of Honshu eastward. The tsunami broke icebergs in parts of Antarctica such as Sulzberger ice shelves.

To conclude, the continental plates snapped which created a 2 meter high tsunami, the energy of the plate movement is then transmitted to the stratum of sediments, causing a large vertical movement in the splay faults, this resulted in the sea level rising above the stratum and this created a 7 metre high sheer wall of a tsunami. If the tsunami was 7 metres offshore it more than doubled by the time in reached the shoreline.

The Indian Ocean Earthquake happened on December 26th, 2004. This was a massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake that occurred under the Indian

On the morning of December 26, 2004 on the eastern shoreline of India, individuals saw the ocean retreating a couple of hundred meters and they could see the uncovered beach front rack. This happened in light of the fact that an enormous tsunami which happened after the undersea seismic tremor with a size of 9.3 severed the bank of Bandeh Aceh in Northern Sumatra.

Tsunamis are some of the most destructive naturally occurring phenomenon in the world. Tsunami refers to a massive ocean wave caused by natural forces such as volcanic eruptions, landslides and underground earth quakes. A large percentage of Tsunamis occur in areas of massive volcanic activities and places with intense earthquake. Thus, Tsunamis are more likely to occur at the bottom of the ocean where there is massive volcanic activities. Although most people mistake tsunamis for tidal waves, the difference between the two is very clear. The differences between the two are in terms of their causes, their magnitude of occurrence, as well as their frequency. A tsunami is extremely destructive and can lead to loss of property, loss of lives, environmental impacts, and even diseases.