It’s completely reversed with tsunamis,” says Titov.

“In earthquakes, a certain number of people die but many more are injured. Once caught in the raging waters, if the currents don’t pull you under, the debris will finish the job. “It’s more like the ocean turns into a white water river and floods everything in its path.” “It’s a wave, but from the observer’s standpoint, you wouldn’t recognize it as a wave,” Titov says. Titov emphasizes that tsunamis look nothing like the giant surfing break-style waves that many of us imagine. The effect was like dropping the world’s largest pebble in the Indian Ocean with ripples the size of mountains extending out in all directions. In the process, massive segments of the ocean floor were forced upward an estimated 30 or 40 meters (up to 130 feet). Rather than delivering one violent jolt, the quake lasted an unrelenting 10 minutes, releasing as much pent-up power as several thousand atomic bombs.ġ970 Young Lords occupy Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx The 2004 quake ruptured a 900-mile stretch along the Indian and Australian plates 31 miles below the ocean floor. “They are the largest faults in the world and they’re all underwater,” says Titov. The quake originated in a so-called megathrust fault, where heavy oceanic plates subduct beneath lighter continental plates. He credits the unsparing destructiveness of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on the raw power of the earthquake that spawned it.

Vasily Titov is a tsunami researcher and forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Center for Tsunami Research. But some of the worst devastation was reserved for the island nation of Sri Lanka, where more than 30,000 people were swept away by the waves and hundreds of thousands left homeless.Īs proof of the record-breaking strength of the tsunami, the last victims of the Boxing Day disaster perished nearly eight hours later when swelling seas and rogue waves caught swimmers by surprise in South Africa, 5,000 miles from the quake’s epicenter. An hour later, on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean, the waves struck the southeastern coast of India near the city of Chennai, pushing debris-choked water kilometers inland and killing more than 10,000 people, mostly women and children, since many of the men were out fishing.

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