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The Toughest 



nature.net 



Wave Files 



By Robert Anderson 



For anyone not affected by the In- 

 donesian tsunami, memory of the 

 catastrophe has begun to fade. Never- 

 theless, a year later, it's worth remem- 

 bering the tragedy and asking what's 

 being done to save people from future 

 killer waves. The tsunami of Decem- 

 ber 26, 2004 — triggered by one of the 

 largest earthquakes recorded since 

 1900 — spread outward at nearly 500 

 miles per hour, leaving nearly 300,000 

 people dead across the Indian Ocean. 



Space-borne cameras recorded the 

 destruction in remarkable detail. Go 

 to DigitalGlobe (www.digitalglobe. 

 com/tsunami_gallery.html) for betore- 

 and-after images of coastland that 

 turned brown as the waters swept 

 them clean of vegetation. Scroll 

 down to the images of Kalutara, in 

 Sri Lanka, where swirling floodwa- 

 ters surged in violent retreat from the 

 beaches. The Center for Remote 

 Imaging, Sensing and Processing at 

 the National University of Singapore 

 has more satellite images (www.crisp. 

 nus.edu.sg/tsunami/tsunami.html). An- 

 other site at NASA has Luvidsat 7 im- 

 ages of the hard-hit Sumatran coast, 

 where monster waves plowed inland 

 tor a mile or more (www.nasa.gov/ 

 vision/earth/lookingatearth/Landsat_ 

 Tsunami.html). A variety of sites inven- 

 toried at serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWork 

 shops/visualization/collections/tsunami_ 

 other.html give a feel for how the waves 

 propagated through the ocean. Click 

 on "Tsunami Visualization Collec- 

 tion" in the box near the top for an 

 array of animations that show how the 

 catastrophe unfolded. For example, 

 scroll down to "Tsunami Generation" 

 near the bottom for a QuickTime 

 video showing how slippage in the 

 Earth's crust can lift hvige volumes of 

 water to form the destructive waves. 



By chance, the Indonesian event was 

 the first major tsunami detected from 



54 NAIL'HAI lllsioKY February 2006 



space as it took place. Unfortunately, 

 it's not practical to rely on satellites to 

 detect tsunamis, primarily because a 

 huge orbiting fleet would be needed 

 for appropriate coverage. Future sys- 

 tems are more likely to deploy an ar- 

 ray of pressure sensors on the ocean 

 bottom, which have already proved ca- 

 pable of detecting tsunami waves only 

 half an inch high. 



For an animation of that kind of 

 system, go to NOAA's Deep-ocean 

 Assessment and Reporting of Tsu- 

 namis (DART) page (www.pmel.noaa. 

 gov/tsunanni/Dart/dart_ms1 .html), or go 

 to www.ndbc.noaa.gov/Dart/dart_map. 

 shtml tor a map of the U.S. system that 

 has been operating in the Pacific since 

 late 2003. The new Indian Ocean 

 warning system, scheduled to become 

 operational this year, is described in 

 National Defense magazine (www. 

 nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2005/ 

 Nov/lndian_Ocean.htm). 



A page on the National Academy 

 of Engineering's site (www.nae.edu/ 

 nae/bridgecom.nsf/weblinks/MKEZ-6DJ 

 KL9?OpenDocument) presents five ar- 

 ticles by tsunami experts on what 

 they've learned from the Sumatra 

 wave and prospects for better warning 

 systems. At tsunamilessons.blogspot. 

 com citizen Doug Carlson keeps close 

 track of what the U.S. government is 

 doing to ensure early notification, par- 

 ticularly near his home in Honolulu. 

 And Atlantic-coast dwellers shouldn't 

 be complacent either. Go to Steven 

 N. Ward's site (es.ucsc.edu/ward/) and 

 click on "Computer Simulations." 

 Ward, a geophysicist at the Universi- 

 ty of California, Santa Cruz, has post- 

 ed animated movies of waves caused 

 by historic and hypothetical landslides 

 and asteroid impacts, some affecting 

 the East Coast. Under the "Impact 

 Tsunami Simulation Movies" menu, 

 select the movie of the Chicxulub 

 event, and you'U see the behemoth 

 wave that accompanied the end of the 

 age of dinosaurs. 



Robert Anderson is a freelance science 

 writer liriiii; in Los An<^eles. 



