Did Any Animals Die In The 2004 Tsunami And Christmas

It was 2004, the day after Christmas, and thousands of European and American tourists had flocked to the beaches of Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia to escape the winter chill in a tropical paradise.

At seven:59 AM, a 9.one-magnitude earthquake—1 of the largest ever recorded—ripped through an undersea error in the Indian Ocean, propelling a massive column of water toward unsuspecting shores. The Boxing 24-hour interval seismic sea wave would be the deadliest in recorded history, taking a staggering 230,000 lives in a matter of hours.

The city of Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra was closest to the powerful earthquake's epicenter and the offset waves arrived in simply 20 minutes. Information technology's nearly incommunicable to imagine the 100-pes roiling mount of water that engulfed the coastal city of 320,000, instantly killing more than 100,000 men, women and children. Buildings folded like houses of cards, trees and cars were swept up in the oil-black rapids and nigh no 1 caught in the deluge survived.

Read more: The Deadliest Natural Disasters in U.Southward. History

Thailand was next. With waves traveling 500 mph beyond the Indian Ocean, the tsunami hit the coastal provinces of Phang Nga and Phuket an hour and a half later. Despite the time lapse, locals and tourists were caught completely unaware of the imminent destruction. Curious beachgoers even wandered out among the oddly receding waves, only to be chased down by a churning wall of water. The death toll in Thailand was almost five,400 including two,000 foreign tourists.

An hour later, on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean, the waves struck the southeastern declension of India virtually the city of Chennai, pushing droppings-choked water kilometers inland and killing more than 10,000 people, more often than not women and children, since many of the men were out fishing. But some of the worst devastation was reserved for the island nation of Sri Lanka, where more than 30,000 people were swept away past the waves and hundreds of thousands left homeless.

As proof of the record-breaking strength of the tsunami, the final victims of the Battle Day disaster perished nearly viii hours later when swelling seas and rogue waves defenseless swimmers past surprise in South Africa, v,000 miles from the convulse'south epicenter.

Vasily Titov is a tsunami researcher and forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Middle for Tsunami Research. He credits the unsparing destructiveness of the 2004 Indian Body of water tsunami on the raw power of the earthquake that spawned information technology. The quake originated in a and so-chosen megathrust mistake, where heavy oceanic plates subduct below lighter continental plates.

"They are the largest faults in the world and they're all underwater," says Titov.

The 2004 quake ruptured a 900-mile stretch forth the Indian and Australian plates 31 miles below the ocean floor. Rather than delivering i violent jolt, the quake lasted an unrelenting 10 minutes, releasing as much pent-up ability as several grand diminutive bombs.

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In the process, massive segments of the body of water floor were forced upwardly an estimated 30 or twoscore meters (upwards to 130 feet). The effect was similar dropping the world's largest pebble in the Indian Ocean with ripples the size of mountains extending out in all directions.

Titov emphasizes that tsunamis look nothing like the giant surfing pause-fashion waves that many of u.s. imagine.

"It'due south a wave, merely from the observer'due south standpoint, y'all wouldn't recognize it every bit a moving ridge," Titov says. "It's more like the ocean turns into a white water river and floods everything in its path."

In one case caught in the raging waters, if the currents don't pull you under, the debris will finish the chore.

"In earthquakes, a sure number of people dice but many more than are injured. Information technology'due south completely reversed with tsunamis," says Titov. "Almost no injuries, because information technology's such a hard disaster to survive."

An earthquake and tsunami of the magnitude that struck in 2004 is and then rare that catastrophic tsunamis are all only unknown in the long cultural histories of India and Sri Lanka, explains Jose Borrero, a seismic sea wave researcher with the Academy of Southern California and director of eCoast, a marine consultancy based in New Zealand.

"[The Indian Bounding main tsunami] came ashore in these places that had no natural warning either, because they were far enough abroad that they didn't feel any of the earthquake," says Borrero. "So without a natural warning, without an official warning and with no history of tsunamis, hit coastlines full of people, that's the perfect combination to cause a lot of death and destruction."

Both Borrero and Titov took part in U.Due south. Geological Survey expeditions in early on 2005 to mensurate the full extent of the seismic sea wave that struck Sumatra. It was during these expeditions that scientists confirmed maximum wave heights of more than than 131 feet on the northwestern tip of the island. Borrero remembers coming upon a jumbo freighter loaded with bags of cement that had been flipped on its back with its propeller in the air.

"This was the most extreme tsunami result since 1960," says Borrero, referring to the 8.vi-magnitude Chilean earthquake and seismic sea wave that punished the Pacific, including the leveling of Hilo, Hawaii, 15 hours after the quake.

Titov volition never forget the scene of widespread devastation he witnessed on Sumatra even months afterwards the seismic sea wave waters had subsided.

"We took a gunkhole all the way from the middle of the island up to Banda Aceh, the hardest hit area, and for hundreds of kilometers information technology was as if somebody had taken an eraser and erased everything underneath the 20-meter line," says Titov. "The sheer calibration of the devastation was just mind-boggling."

Source: https://www.history.com/news/deadliest-tsunami-2004-indian-ocean

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