Word: shore
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...were unaware that a powerful earthquake off the coast of Indonesia had triggered a tsunami that would kill more than 155,000. The deadly wave felt like little more than a bump to the Chens because tsunamis don’t develop into tall waves until they approach the shore...
They are burning bodies on the shore of Tamil Nadu in southern India, and Manikimuttu, 24, whose grandfather is among the 60 or so in the pyre, is crazed with grief, one moment scooping water into cooking pots and throwing it on the flames, the next collapsing in uncontrollable sobs. They are collecting bodies from the normally green lawn in front of the old mosque in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, now littered with a thick debris of dead snakes, chickens and humans--at just one collection point in the city, authorities have gathered 3,500 corpses. On the Andaman coast...
...felt the sea moving around him. "That must have been when the earthquake hit," he says. (The precise time of the shock was 7:58 a.m.) About half an hour later came the shock wave--the tsunami--that devastated the region. At first, Bustami saw water retreat from shore, with fish jumping around on the empty beaches. Then, he says, "I heard this strange thunderous sound from somewhere, a sound I'd never heard before. I thought it was the sound of bombs." The water rose behind him as high as the coconut trees on the shoreline...
...miles an hour. In deep, open water, you would never notice even the most devastating tsunamis, which are often no more than a few inches high there. But when the water's depth decreases, the wavelength shortens and the height of the wave increases. Then it crashes onto shore with the power to wreck buildings and throw trucks around as if they were Ping-Pong balls...
Tsunamis, moreover, have a trick up their watery sleeve, one that can trap the unwary. If the trough of a wave hits the shore before a crest, the first thing that anyone on shore notices is not water rushing onto the land but the opposite. That is what happened in Thailand and Sri Lanka. In the Sri Lankan town of Trincomalee, a hotel manager remembers the sea rushing out so the beach became magically full of gorgeous, colorful, stranded fish. "Men ran down to the shore with gunny-bags and stuffed them full of fish," he says. On Phuket, Tiina...