Really cool tsunami animation
 

Katkeeper found a really great GIF animation that shows how the tsunami's waves worked but at over 600k, it's too large for IotD, so i've linked it.

Incredible. Does the red and blue coloring have any significance beyond clarity? Do the color changes represent different quakes or aftershocks or anything like that?

I'd guess that red is underwater and blue is surface.

This is VERRY cool animation!!!!
Question , they call hurracanes monsoons in the pacific ,what would you call a tsunami in the atlantic ???

A tidal wave.

Damn, I'd have ocean front property.......for a few minutes. :eek:

Looking at the animation, I think that red represents initial wave energy, and blue represents reflected wave energy.

I was wondering why this didn't make IOTD. I was about to disinherit UT.

It is a sad Christmas for Eastsouth Asia.

I don't know why, but I got to wondering about Diego Garcia, and the US base there. I knew that it was a low lying island in the Indian Ocean. I thought it might have experienced some problems. I looked it up in a map, because I wasn't quite sure where exactly it was located. Turns out it's one of the dots on the lower left in this thread's animation, in a direct line from the epicenter of the quake. The animation starts over again before the wave hits the island, so I'm not sure if they actually got hit, but it looks like it. Even Somalia lost a couple hundred people, and this base is much closer to the epicenter.

So I did a Google news search. According to Stars and Stripes, nobody on Diego Garcia noticed anything that day. The highest point of the island is only 22 feet above mean sea level, so the place could have been completely submerged if it had been hit.

Apparently, according to another paper source, Diego Garcia was one of the few islands in the Indian Ocean that actually got a warning in advance of the tsunamis. I wonder if they did anything to prepare. There are no hills to run to in Diego Garcia.

San Diego noticed a rise in sea level of 22cm. New Zealand's levels were like 50cm up.

If Diego Garcia is a relatively steep rise from the ocean floor, the tsunami could have essentially flowed around the island, not having had any "shelf" to pile up on or against.

I just want to say that when I mentioned San Diego I did not think it was Diego Garcia.

Amazing. Possibly more than 44,000 dead. They'll probably never know the full extent, either, as entire families could have been washed out to sea.

Is anyone else somewhat creeped out that the US news didn't really pick this up? The BBC did extensive reporting for hours on this disaster while CNN/Fox/MSN spent much more time reporting on the "lackluster holiday sales increase" of only ~3%. Yawn.

Exchange the jacket for puce. :angel: