Damage form Tsunami

The death toll will likely be in excess of 150,000 and the damage though restricted to the immediate coastal area is unparalleled. The earthquake, whose magnitude was a staggering 9.0, unleashed walls of water more than 10 meters high.
The regions has been struck by numerous after shocks-note the table and map below. Much like a zipper the quakes initially progressed north along the fault to the Andaman Island Region..

Cause Of this Tsunami


A tsunami is not a single wave, but a series of traveling ocean waves generated by geological disturbances near or below the ocean floor.With nothing to stop them, these waves race across the ocean until they reach shore where they slow down and rise up in height


Most tsunamis are triggered by large under sea earth quakes but they can be caused by land slides, volcanoes or even meteor impacts. The last large tsunami in the region was due to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, due to the collapse of that volcano during an explosive eruption.
In this case the ocean bottom shifted displacing sea water in the ocean basin. The bigger the earthquake, the more the Earth's crust shifts and the more seawater begins to move. A quake of this magnitude typically shifts the earth surface by up to 10-20 meters. In this case the rupture was up to 400 miles long, leading to a massive region of the ocean bottom shifting. The waves traveled outward just like those from throwing arock into the water.
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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. In a tsunami, waves typically radiate out in directions opposite from the seismic disturbance. In the case of the Sumatra quake, the seismic fault ran north to south beneath the ocean floor, while the tsunami waves traveled mainly west and east...

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