Word: sumatra
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...While Phuket trembled in fear, the small island of Nias, a surfing mecca off the western coast of Sumatra, was shaken to the ground by an earthquake that registered 8.7 on the Richter scale. Unlike the quake that struck in December, this one did not create a devastating tsunami. But in Nias, just 70 km from the epicenter, death and destruction were instantaneous. "Everything happened so fast," says Nasima Zai, 42, a shopkeeper in Gunung Sitoli, Nias' largest town. Nasima was in bed when her house started to shake. She woke her husband, grabbed their two young children, and tried...
...Have these two earthquakes finally relieved the region's tectonic stress? A: Don't bet on it. The area off the coast of Sumatra is a subduction zone, a highly unstable region where the India Plate, the Australia Plate, the Sunda Plate and the Burma Micro-Plate collide and dive beneath one another. Earthquakes tend to occur in clusters in subduction zones, and McCloskey says his initial findings indicate that the latest quake has accentuated the stress along the Sunda Trench fault for another 300 km south. The result is like the steady growth of a crack...
...soon. There's no way to tell when an earthquake will strike?scientists can measure the stress on a fault, but they don't know how much force it can bear. Still, two massive quakes in quick succession are a reminder of how little the earth under and around Sumatra can be trusted...
...Australian navy supply ship H.M.A.S. Kanimbla was in Singapore on March 29, preparing to head home after three months helping in the reconstruction of Indonesia's earthquake- and tsunami-ravaged Aceh province. That night, a second earthquake struck Nias, Banyak and Simeulue islands, off the coast of Sumatra. Within hours, the Kanimbla - equipped for the rapid transport of soldiers, medics and heavy machinery - was heading back to the area. Medical teams raced for its Sea King helicopters, which began scouring Nias for badly injured survivors and ferrying them to the ship's hospital for treatment. On the afternoon...
MAHAYATI INADIMAN, Indonesian woman, 27, in the aftermath of an 8.7-magnitude earthquake that killed more than 500 people in Sumatra, which had barely recovered from the December tsunami