Video 10
1/19/13 Tsunami
The wave that Shook the world It’s almost hard to believe the havoc entailed with a tsunami. The Ocean is so huge that it travels that far and still picking up speed. The after math of one disaster becomes several clenching catastrophes. The variation of a wave train catching people by surprise, a powerful water wall delivers about a hundred thousand tons of water. The creation of a tsunami is wondrous how it grows so quick. But where are the warning signs? Buried underneath water an earthquake upon the ocean floor where plates are constantly moving building friction and causing stress as they collide then suddenly they snap sending out vibrations. The energy can flow as a shockwave through the earth’s crust or as water waves, at a thousand kilometers per hour. Traveling at five hundred miles per an hour but as it approaches it under goes a process called amplification. This process slows the front of the wave allowing the back to catch up and then get whammed with a water wall. It also removes the sea shore water by guzzling it in about a mile then this wall surges forward with a massive deadly volume of water. This is exactly what happened on December 25th, 2004 a shallow rupture on the ocean floor. The deeper the rupture there is less damage because it travels much further, to arrive to the surface using up its energy. Too bad this was not the case with this quake that took only four minutes long for the quake to ripe open the Indian Ocean floor, tech-tonic plates on the move when they collide, stress on contact slips and tears the crust. Most of the energy went horizontally some went up of a whopping magnitude of nine on the Richter scale. The most powerful natural hazard in all the world’s quakes put together in the last five years. This huge catastrophe took two hundred and fifty thousand lives across dozens of countries. There