Friday, July 4, 2008

DECEMBER 2004 TSUNAMI FACTS

I happened to see these facts somewhere. Really huge magnitude. check it out 4 yourself.

Released energy equivalent to 9,560 gigatons of TNT equivalent (550 million times that of Hiroshima Atomic bomb), or about 370 years of energy used in the United States in 2005 killing more than 225,000 people in eleven countries.

Waves up to 30 meters (100 feet). Average overhead roads we see on the road have 5 meter clearance.

Magnitude of between 9.1 and 9.3 recorded on a seismograph.

It caused the entire planet to vibrate as much as 1 cm, shortened the length of a day by 2.68 microseconds, caused the Earth to minutely "wobble" on its axis by up to 2.5 cm and triggered other earthquakes as far away as Alaska.

In deep ocean water, tsunami waves form only a small hump, barely noticeable and harmless, which generally travels at a very high speed of 500 to 1,000 km/h ; in shallow water near coastlines, a tsunami slows down to only tens of kilometres an hour but in doing so forms large destructive waves.

Tsunami was noticed as far as Struisbaai in South Africa, some 8,500 km (5,300 mi) away, where a 1.5 m high tide was observed.

In the minutes preceding a tsunami strike, the sea often recedes temporarily from the coast. Around the Indian Ocean, this rare sight reportedly induced people, especially children, to visit the coast to investigate and collect stranded fish on as much as 2.5 km of exposed beach, with fatal results.

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