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The Indian Ocean Tsunami
85 percent of all tsunamis occur in the Pacific Ocean, generated in the regions where the main tectonic plates forming the floor of the Pacific collide against themselves or against the continental plates that surround the ocean basin, in an area known as the Ring of Fire.
Date: 2/5/2005 9:19:28 AM ( 19 y ) ... viewed 2531 times
On Sunday 26 December 2004 at 8:14 p.m. EST, within minutes following an alarm signaling a strong earthquake in the Indian Ocean, NOAA’s Tsunami Warning Centers in Hawaii and Alaska issued information bulletins to all ICG/ITSU member states and other Pacific nations indicating that a magnitude 8.0 earthquake (later upgraded to M9.0 by the U. S. Geological Survey) had occurred off the west coast of Northern Sumatra, Indonesia. According to the agreed-upon procedures for the International Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific, this event did not pose a threat to the Pacific. The PTWC (Pacific Tsunami Warning Center), however, continued to monitor the event.
Within a few hours, Vasily Titov, associate director of the Tsunami Inundation Mapping Efforts (TIME) at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Wash. and his counterpart in Japan, Kenji Satake, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, produced preliminary estimates of the main features of the event. Tsunami travel time maps were quickly prepared using software developed by Dr. Viacheslav Gusiakov, Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics, Novosibirsk, RUSSIA). (see all model outputs and maps on
http://ioc.unesco.org/itsu/contents.php?id=135).
Information was posted on the ITSU web site (http://ioc.unesco.org/itsu ) as from Monday 27 December 2004.
85 percent of all tsunamis occur in the Pacific Ocean, generated in the regions where the main tectonic plates forming the floor of the Pacific collide against themselves or against the continental plates that surround the ocean basin, in an area known as the Ring of Fire. The Mediterranean and Caribbean Seas also have histories of some locally destructive tsunamis. Tsunamis in the Indian Ocean have been rare and far part in time. This might explain why no tsunami warning system has been developed in the Indian Ocean.
The Indian Ocean tsunami is now reported to be one of the strongest in the world for the past 40 years. More than 100,000 lives have been lost and material damage is tremendous.
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