Word: wave
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...cause of the carnage was a massive earthquake that trembled the earth's crust off the western coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, setting off through the oceans shock waves that were felt more than 3,000 miles away on the coast of East Africa, where at least 200 people died. Bustami, a fisherman from the Sumatran village of Bosun, is one who experienced the quake and tsunami and lived to tell about them. Sometime after 7:30 on the morning of Dec. 26, he says, he was on his boat just off the coast when he felt...
...Nicols, an engineer who researches nanotechnology at a Swedish university, was on a rock-climbing expedition in Tonsai, Thailand, when the tsunami hit, and he promptly used his Swedish cell phone to message his father John, a professor at the University of Oregon. "Just had a big tidal wave hit," read the first message. "I am not injured but lost some climbing gear, my camera and [my Thai] mobile phone. Please tell family am safe." Within hours of the quake, blogs with details of where to send aid had been launched, and terrifying pictures and videos of the tsunami were...
...movement of the plates sent shock waves through the water. Although tsunamis are often (incorrectly) called tidal waves, they have nothing to do with tides. They are, rather, very long waves--sometimes with hundreds of miles between their crests--that race along the ocean at speeds that can reach almost 500 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...
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...
...charge of the Amanpuri boatyard, who was at sea with clients. O'Leary knew the signs. He told Neustfisten to get everyone off the beach and called friends at other hotels to tell them a tsunami was coming. The Amanpuri beach was cleared. About five minutes later, the waves started rolling in. Seppanen, a few miles away, saw the horizon rise and a wall of water approach, bringing with it small boats with anchors dangling. "At first I thought, It's O.K. Nothing bad is going to happen," she says. "A few seconds later the wave hit the road...