Word: oceaneering
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...heard about the earthquake on TV. "I just managed to complete the job," Ranjani says, and then nurse, mother and baby boy headed for higher ground. Even more critical, seismologists from Hawaii to Japan had the relevant phone numbers at hand to get in touch with officials in Indian Ocean nations. They, in turn, exhibited little of the indecisiveness that cost countless lives in December. "We were calling harbor masters, civil-defense people, and people in governments," says Barry Hirshorn, a geophysicist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center near Honolulu. "[If they didn't speak much English] we would just...
...however, the region must make do with makeshift solutions. To be effective in the long run, the countries rimming the Indian Ocean need a system that can determine not only when a tsunami might occur, but also when it won't, so that warnings can be issued judiciously. In Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, hundreds of thousands of people spent hours waiting for a tsunami that never came. In Nias, the fear of a tsunami probably cost many lives of people who were trapped in rubble because their relatives had headed for high ground. The local government was paralyzed from...
...Pacific, deep-ocean pressure sensors are able to measure passing tsunamis, and coastal gauges take water-level measurements that are relayed in real time to a region-wide warning center. Nothing like that exists in the Indian Ocean. The U.N.'s International Oceanographic Commission is now working on creating an independent regional warning system that it hopes to have installed by the end of 2006. But that may prove difficult. The system will be expensive to establish and maintain, and pledges from donor countries in the tsunami's aftermath have not materialized. India has balked at the idea...
...didn't last week's earthquake cause a massive tsunami? A: The earthquake ruptured some 30 km below the ocean floor, significantly deeper than the Dec. 26 quake, which was only 10 km deep and in shallower waters. All that earth muffled the force of last week's quake and kept the seafloor from rising suddenly, which could have triggered a major tsunami. "There just wasn't a big enough bulge in the water to create a big set of waves," says Kerry Sieh, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology. Some minor tsunami waves were generated, according...
...recent paper in Nature, the Dec. 26 quake intensified the stress on two nearby faults that are close to the epicenter of the March 28 temblor: one running directly beneath the city of Banda Aceh and one running beneath the Sunda Trench, a deep seam in the ocean floor. That additional stress may have precipitated last week's quake...