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Quake and Tsunami Devastate South Asia
pfb writes "From reuters, 'The world's fifth-largest quake in a century has hit southern Asia, triggering a speeding tsunami that crashed into Sri Lanka and India, drowning hundreds, and swamping tourist islands in Thailand and the Maldives.'"
Wikipedia
Yes, he lives in Colombo. As you can see from the picture, he is on the coast. I hope he is all right. :(
A blog like any other.
I keep a list of earthquake related resources.
http://virtuelvis.com/
Yeah my brother and wife (John and Brigette) are currently in Thailand and were planning to dive today... unfortunatly I have no idea where in Thailand they are....
He hasn't cotacted me yet, but even if he wanted to I doubt he could.
Fingers crossed!
p.s. The British Foreign office have set up an emergency help line: 0207 008 0000, I havn't been able to get through yet, its really busy.
A BBC World report said that this sort of warning might be available in the Pacific where such things are more common but is not (yet?) set up for the Indian Ocean.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/12/26/asi
Check out the BBC News site. There is a link that says "Live Video", given that the earthquake is top news ATM.
It seems that a displacement in the sea bottom ocurred, moving 10-30 metres up along a rupture of 1000 km, causing a wave of hundreds of cubic kilometres of ocean water.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
You can find the latest news at http://news.google.co.in (The Indian Version of Google News )
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You're beeing a bit harsh. These waves travel hundreds of kph/mph so any warning will only give you a few minutes, at most maybe an hour. All countries in the region are poor and not very well developed so they cant afford the types of systems you're talking about. Mostly they rely on western countries for warnings and the timings are very tight.
A warning system should really be installed along the american southeast coast. The mountains/ocean shelves on several islands of the european/north african coast are extremely close to colapsing into the atlantic which would send enormous tsunamis towards USA. USA, as opposed to the countries struck today, can afford the systems...
going back to hoping my neighbours made it... they're on vacation in Phuket
More on Tsunami at Wikipedia
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You can watch live Indian News at http://www.ddinews.com. I hope they can handle the Slashdot effect :(
>> Techflock-flock onto the best bits of technology
A 9.0 earthquake would release the equivalent of 1,800 Megatons, so it would be in the same ballpark.
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According to this bbc picture Colombo, Sri Lanka also saw some destruction.r es/4125643.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictu
goto picture 10.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
the NYTimes even said it disturbed the rotation of the earth.
I live in Chennai(Madras),(Capital City of the State Tamil Nadu - the region worst affected by the Tsunami in India ). For us, this is the first time ever something like a Tsunami hits our coast. The earthquake itself was not deadly but the tides alone were responsible for the death of more than 1000 people according to some reports. Since this happened early in the morning and the day being a sunday, not many people were awake at that time. In my city alone almost 100 poor fishermen who live in the huts along the seashore were washed away. Coastal regions in the Southern parts of my state where even more affected - a lot many were drowned in the flash floods. The fact that I was sleeping unaware of the whole thing at that time, less than a kilometre away from the sea, sends a shiver down my spine.
You can find some pictures here.
There was ample time - the P-wave of the quake hit Madras, India at about 6.30 AM (local time), about 4 minutes after the quake occurred. However, the Tsunami reached only at about 9 - 9.30 AM (local time), giving a clear 2.5 to 3 hours after the quake.
Until 3 years ago the nation that gave most was Japan. They've cut back in the last few years though, and the US has given a lot of money recently to Pakistan, even though it has been selling its nuclear secrets to terrorists.
The country giving the largest proportion of aid per unit income is Norway, which gives about 6 times as much as the US per unit income.
I found some stats here if you're interested
Earthquakes over M8.0 are called 'great,' as in catastrophic, for a good reason...
There are several kinds of earthquake 'magnitude' measures, all of which yield similar numbers. Moment magnitude may be converted directly to energy:
Magnitude = log (energy in ergs)/1.5 - 10.7
For moment magnitude 8.9, this works out to 2.5 x 10^29 ergs, which is about 6 Million Megatons of TNT. The impact of 2004MN4 works out to an earthquake magnitude 6.2 to 6.6.
Quote from the article:
An earthquake along a subduction (upthrust) fault is more likely to generate a devastating Tsunami than one from a lateral fault line (the Andaman fault is a subduction fault).
Dr Clarke used to live in Barne's Place (quite far from the coast), and I don't think he has shifted. I traveled by a road closeby this evening, and there was zero damage to that neighbourbood.
However, as far as health is concerned, Dr Clarke is not fareing very well. I saw him on a wheelchair at a recent convention where he was a (the?) guest of honour.
I'm a Japanese, and I feel I heard of the legend, but uncertain.
So I googled.
see the full story(Japanese page)
The story was known as one article of our very old language arts schoolbook of national elementary schools. It was published about from 1937 to 1947. I've never seen the text, of cource, but I think I heard this story from my teacher.
This is a story about a farmar and an earthquake which hitted Kishu (now, Wakayama Pref.), in 1854. Outline of the story is totally same as Rob Carr described above. In addition, he is not just a farmer, but a 7th meister of Yamasa soy sauce factory, a first chairman of council of Wakayama Pref., and a first minister of Post Office Dept. (It was a era of revolution...)
For foreign countries, Lafcadio Hearn (known as Yakumo Koizumi in Japan) introduced this story first, in his book 'Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (ISBN:1596050217 or other)'. One Japanese teacher rewrited this to a simple and dense text for children, and choosed as an article of textbook by the nation. This version is re-translated to English, and taken in textbook of Colorado state elementary school, titled 'The burning of the rice fields' (the page is saying so. I don't know it's true or not).
Actually, in Japan, everyone knows, I believe, that sea surface oftenly drawn off before a Tsunami. We live with earthquakes, typhoons, volcanos, and fires (because of densely build old wooden houses). We are so careful(even an exess sometimes) and preparing for such disasters, so we can imagine to some degree what is going on. It is terrible to have a great Tsunami without no warning and information. Systems and informations are required.
Richter is a logarithmic scale, not linear.
The stereotypical Slashdot computer geek is an amoral dork who rarely wanders away from his computer, which is probably located in his parents' basement. There are exceptions, but that's the stereotype. Enjoy.
There was a huge earthquake (8.1 on Richter) south of Tasmania 3 days before. It made headlines http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000081&si d=aUIanL7wC_m8&refer=australia/ but fortunately no victims. However if you look at a map of tectonic plates http://geology.about.com/library/bl/maps/blplatesw topoehem.htm/ and compare it with the location of the earthquake http://www.iris.edu/seismon/ you can see it happened at the southern tip of the Indian plate. Now 3 days later on the middle of the eastern edge of the same plate another huge earthquake...looks like plate movement to me.
- The moon's orbit is elliptical, and as any Slashdotter who "knows about science" can tell you, that means its gravitational pull on Earth varies.
:)
- Even if the moon's gravitational pull didn't vary, the interplay between the gravitational pulls of the moon and the sun does vary, with the greatest combined effect occurring at new moon, the second-greatest at full moon, and the least effect at the quarters. (Read a tide table to see what I mean.)
Hope this clarifies matters somewhat...Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
more like a lot of geologists didnt study ANY astronomy at all, there are very few scientists skilled at both sectors.
And they have prooved that the moons orbit does effect the land like tides, they did GPS measurements and found the land does indeed move, but you cannot see/feel it.
But dude, please do a statistical analysis of all quakes vs moon positions and get back to me.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
To get the latest info on the Earthquake, try monitoring this feed from PubSub.com:
2 bd5f.xml
http://rss.pubsub.com/ef/c3/b9173332d3d1011651b6f
Content will be updated every 15 minutes and will contain the most recent 32 blog entries that mention the event.
bob wyman
From Reuters ...
... to the west coast of Thailand and Malaysia," he said. "You can walk inland for 15 minutes to get to a safe area."
....p e=topN ews&storyID=7180384&pageNumber=1
NO WARNING SYSTEM
In Los Angeles, the head of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said U.S. officials who detected the undersea quake tried frantically to get a warning out about the tsunami.
But there was no official alert system in the region, said Charles McCreery, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's center in Honolulu.
"It took an hour and a half for the wave to get from the earthquake to Sri Lanka and an hour for it to get
"We tried to do what we could," he said. "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world."
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?ty
Basically, it says "THERE IS NO TSUNAMI WARNING OR WATCH IN EFFECT.".
Yes, of course, there was no tsunami in the region this warning center is responsible for. But who writes these reports? Is it sensible to just write "no tsunami warning", without specifying that it's a different story on the other side, in the Indian ocean? Wouldn't people writing these reports be supposed to be aware of it?
Anyway, that report, while it may be technically correct for it's region, sounds really weird to me.
Since the link is for the "latest report", and will change over time, here is the complete text of that page: