Word: sundae
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...rickety boat emitted signals of distress from the Sunda strait, a body of water sandwiched between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Local authorities had no vessels in the area, and called on Australia for assistance. When H.M.A.S. Armidale, an Australian naval ship, approached the troubled craft, they found 78 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers heading for Australia. Unsurprisingly, their wooden boat was not seaworthy, and those on board were transferred to the Oceanic Viking, an armed patrol vessel used by Australian customs to track poachers of the highly endangered Patagonian toothfish in these waters...
...team at the University of Ulster showed in a 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...
...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...
Very early on the morning of May 10, 1883, a lighthouse keeper gazing out at the Sunda Strait, which separates Sumatra from Java, saw the surface of the ocean suddenly whiten, go still, then become oil-slick smooth. Like an unsuspecting sorority girl in a horror movie, he shrugged it off as insignificant--just part of the region's usual seismic background noise. Ninety-nine days later, the nearby volcanic island of Krakatoa exploded, producing probably the loudest sound heard in human history and killing more than 36,000 people...
PORTSIDE Voyagers who get shore leave in Jakarta should make a few hours for Sunda Kelapa, the port of old Batavia and the nearby Museum Bahari, Indonesia's excellent maritime museum. Although the 800-year-old port has been eclipsed by the modern port at Tanjung Priok, high-riding Bugis boats from South Sulawesi province, one of the world's last seagoing schooner fleets, still call regularly...