Tsunami Giant Tidal Waves & Sea Surges News Archive 2005

Solovev (Editor)

Olga N. Solovieva

Chan N. Go

Khen S. Kim

Nikolay A. Shchetnikov

Sergey L. Soloviev

“Eroded and fragmentary shells occur within the ‘drift’ deposits on Moel Tryfaen, a mountain in North Wales rising 1,300ft (400m) above sea level. Perplexingly the species represented include not only northern but also temperate and southern forms adapted to very varied habitats. Some required deep and others shallow water, some sandy and others muddy water, and some were peculiar to shingly and others to a bare rocky environment.

In stating that ice could never have brought together so varied a molluscan assemblage as this, it is hardly necessary to add that water could have – in which case the enveloping drift’ deposits must have been similarly water-borne.”

“The destructive capacity of last year’s tsunami wiped life from Earth in numbers that defy comprehension. Each one gone dramatically altering other lives – friends and families in a chain wrapped countless times around the world.

Towns and villages and possessions obliterated. In many parts, the very presence of human beings simply erased, as if they were never there.

The tsunamis took a great deal away, but in one tiny corner, they actually gave something back. And it has archaeologists and historians arguing about precisely what it is.

It is evidence of a long-lost ancient community? Is there a mystical temple covered by time, or perhaps even an entire city buried beneath the sand and the sea around Mahabalipuram in southern India.

“On the banks of Siletz Bay in Lincoln City, Oregon, officials dedicated a memorial last week to one of America’s worst calamities: a huge earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands of Native Americans 300 years ago. But the memorial’s main job is not to commemorate the disaster, which has only just come to light, but to warn local people that similar devastation could strike at any time.

The area sits over massive fault lines whose dangers have been highlighted by a startling new scientific discipline that combines Earth science studies and analysis of ancient legends. This is geomythology, and it is transforming our knowledge of earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, says the journal Science.

Apart from the ‘lost’ Seattle earthquake, geomythology has recently revealed that a volcano in Fiji, thought to be dormant, is active, a discovery that followed geologists’ decision to follow up legends of a mountain appearing overnight.

“Last year’s Indian Ocean tsunami killed five members of the wandering Shompen tribe in India’s remote Nicobar islands, an official said Thursday in the first confirmation of casualties among a prehistoric tribe that is nearing extinction.

Indian officials had until now reported only that some members of Shompen went missing after the Dec. 26 tsunami. However, a district official, Vivek Porwal, told The Associated Press that five people are confirmed to have died.

The brick temple dates back more than 2,000 years to the late Tamil Sangam period and was discovered on the beachfront near Saluvankuppam, just north of a famous World Heritage site at Mahabalipuram.

“The ruins of an ancient temple built by a long-vanished kingdom in southern India are being excavated by archaeologists who say the sanctum may have been destroyed centuries ago by a tsunami.

The temple was found in the region affected by the Dec. 26 Asian tsunami, and the ‘discovery now poses very interesting questions … about the history of tsunamis,’ the archaeologist leading the excavation, Thyagarajan Satyamurthy said Wednesday.

The temple appears to have been built between the second century BC and the first century AD It was excavated this month just north of Mahabalipuram, a port town 50km south of Madras, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, by a team from the government Archaeological Survey of India, Satyamurthy said.

The temple appears to have been built between second century B.C. and first century A.D and was excavated this month just north of Mahabalipuram, a port town in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, by a team from the government Archaeological Survey of India, said the group’s chief, Thyagarajan Satyamurthy.

“A powerful, massive tide is expected to sweep over the Qiantang River in Hangzhou, capital city of East China’s Zhejiang Province, later this month, posing a potential danger to people outside the designated tide-watching areas, experts said yesterday.

The tidal waves are likely to reach a height of 2.5 metres much higher than that of past years on Wednesday, the 18th day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar year, the traditional tide-watching day, said Bao Yuepeng, director of the Hangzhou Water Resource Monitoring Station.

‘Thanks to the strong rainfall, which swept away much of the sediment, the tide this year will be as tall and grand as it was said to be before,’ Bao told China Daily.

“Officials said on Saturday a ‘small tsunami’ was recorded after a strong earthquake struck off the east coast of Papua New Guinea the previous day, but no casualties or damage had been reported.

‘We had information on a small tsunami, and that is the concern we have at the moment,’ Col. Eric Ani, director of the National Disaster Management Office in Port Moresby, told AFP.

Communication with some remote areas was difficult, but there had been no reports of damage or injuries and ‘we are hopeful that is it’, Ani said.

The finding adds weight to a hypothesis that the island could have inspired the legend recounted by the philosopher Plato more than 2,000 years ago. Evidence comes from a seafloor survey published in the journal Geology.

“Hurricane Ivan generated a wave more than 90 feet (27 metres) high – thought to be the tallest and most intense ever measured – scientists have revealed.

It would have dwarfed a 10-storey building and had the power to snap a ship in half – but never reached land.

The wave was recorded by sensors on the ocean floor as Hurricane Ivan passed over the Gulf of Mexico last September.

“Australian researchers have helped identify a volcanic area between New Zealand and Tonga which could trigger a devastating tsunami at any time.

The volcanic area on the seabed contains 75 previously unknown volcanoes and is one of the most active in the world, Australian National University geologist Richard Arculus said.

“An earthquake of initially estimated magnitude of 7.3 Richter scale near Nicobar Islands was reported by Japanese Meteorological agency Sunday 16.02 GMT, CNN reported Sunday.

The earthquake has potential to generate tsunami in littoral areas in Indian Ocean, the report cautioned.

“United States State Department officials today acknowledged that US scientists predicted a tsunami could form after the December 26 earthquake, but claimed that they failed to issue a warning because such waves are rare in the Indian Ocean.

Scientists Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India, the worst affected countries, often alleged that the scientists in the US Geographic Survey were aware of the impending tsunami, and deliberately withheld information of the disaster, but this is the first time the US officials have ever admitted to it.

Andrew Natsios, US Agency for International Development Administrator made the startling admission answering questions posed by journalists at press conference organized to update media on the progress maid by the US authorities in reconstructing the badly affected areas during the six months following the tsunami.

“Six months after the mega-tsunami that killed more than a quarter of a million people in lands around the Indian Ocean, scientists are literally digging for answers to the question: ‘How can we anticipate such cataclysms in the future?’

They’re excavating the soil along the world’s coastlines, seeking geological evidence of past tsunamis, some of which struck during epochs before the Roman Empire.

Typical evidence is a sheet of beach sand sandwiched between younger and older layers of ordinary soil, like a slice of ham between two slabs of sourdough.

“For thousands of years India’s gentle Nicobarese tended their coconut plantations and reared pigs on the sandy shores of their island paradise.

Today, the tribespeople have turned their backs on the sea, and may be turning their backs on their ancient way of life.

The tsunami that struck their shores five months ago not only killed thousands of Nicobarese, it cracked the very foundations of their economy and their society.

‘People have not come out of their shock and trauma,’ said Samuel Stephen, a 35-year-old government worker from the flattened village of Mus on the northern tip of Car Nicobar.

“The March earthquake that struck near Nias island off Sumatra was so powerful that it created about 10 new islands, Japan’s Geographical Survey Institute said.

Researchers, led by Mikio Tobita, spotted the new islets on images taken by the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite, GSI officials said earlier this month.

The March 28 temblor had a magnitude of 8.7, but unlike the Dec. 26 quake off Sumatra, it did not trigger killer tsunami.

“At least 15,000 villagers were evacuated after a freak tide caused a surge of seawater in the southern Indian state of Kerala, triggering memories of December’s devastating tsunami, officials said today.

Seawater crashed into fishing hamlets in Trivandrum, Ernakulam, Alappuzha, Thrissur and Kannur districts, state revenue minister K.M Mani said.

“Waning government support and shrinking resources could delay the identification of thousands of victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami indefinitely, Interpol chief Ronald Noble said today.

‘I’m not pointing the finger at any one country, I’m pointing the finger at all countries. We as a world community should be embarrassed,’ he told Reuters Television.

Mr Noble, whose international law enforcement agency is overseeing the identification of tsunami victims, said diminishing funds and a shortage of Disaster Victim Identification experts were huge problems.

“Rebuilding tsunami-ravaged Asia is going extremely slowly the United Nations warned, as global business leaders met today for the first time since the December 26 tragedy to devise swift reconstruction plans with governments.

‘The reconstruction effort is still too slow,’ Jan Egeland, the UN coordinator of massive international relief said at the one-day ‘private sector summit on post-tsunami rehabilitation and reconstruction’ in Washington.

“Nearly four months after devastating tidal waves struck the east coast of India, a study has revealed that the Dec 26 tsunami considerably changed Tamil Nadu’s shoreline.

The study conducted by the Suganthi Devadason Marine Research Institute, a Tuticorin-based NGO, says marine fauna and flora were more or less unaffected by the tsunami.

“Shortly after the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami tragedy, stories and news reports appeared making claims that animals and aboriginal tribes had escaped the danger because they possessed a mysterious ‘sixth sense’ that somehow warned them in time.

For example: ‘no dead animals have been found as a result of the tsunami, confiming animals’ sixth sense’ and ‘no one has found dead animals in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami’.

The deadly tsunami on 26 December, 2004 was the result of Saturn, Moon, Earth and the Sun falling in a straight line, claims a retired scientist of Department of Atomic Energy.

Paramahamsa Tewari, who supervised construction of Narora and Kaiga atomic plants and authored controversial ‘space vortex theory’, says his conclusion about the cause of tsunami stems from his theory that all spinning cosmic objects including the Sun develop electrical fields that repel each other.

On the fateful day, Saturn, Moon, Earth and the Sun were perfectly aligned. As a result, Earth was subjected to the repulsive electrical force of the Sun on one side.

“Indonesia’s president said on Tuesday he had been told to slaughter 1,000 sheep to prevent a repeat of the disastrous quakes that have hit his country, but he rejected the advice as superstitious nonsense.

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said he had been bombarded with telephone text messages, or SMS, saying sacrificial lambs could calm the seismic forces that have claimed thousands of lives.

“A tsunami in the Bristol Channel could have caused the deaths of up to 2,000 people in one of Britain’s greatest natural disasters, experts have said.

For centuries, it has been thought that the great flood of January 1607 was caused by high tides and severe storms. It is estimated that 200 square miles of land in south Wales and south west England were covered by water.

“At two minutes to eight in the morning on Boxing Day 2004, a magnitude 9.3 earthquake ripped apart the seafloor off the coast of northwest Sumatra.

Over 100 years of accumulated stress was released in the second biggest earthquake in recorded history.

It unleashed a devastating tsunami that travelled thousands of kilometres across the Indian Ocean, taking the lives of nearly 300,000 people in countries as far apart as Indonesia, the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Somalia.

“Marine archaeologists spent nine years trawling the seabed of Sri Lanka’s Galle port to collect thousands of centuries-old treasures buried underwater in shipwrecks.

But it took just a few seconds for them to be reclaimed by the ocean when a tsunami battered the shores of this island nation on December 26 and swept away everything in its path, including hopes of opening the country’s first maritime museum.

The collection of priceless artefacts — including spoons, jars, jugs, bottles, cannons and leather belts — were to be exhibited to showcase the maritime heritage Sri Lanka shared with European invaders and Arab traders.

“For a few minutes, after the water had receded far from shore and before it came raging back as a tsunami, the fishermen stood along the beach and stared at the reality of generations of legends.

Or so they say. Spread across a kilometre, the site was encrusted with barnacles and covered in mud. But the fishermen insist they saw the remains of ancient temples and hundreds of refrigerator-sized blocks, all briefly exposed before the sea swallowed them up again.

“Three popular beach resorts were among seven islands on India’s Andamans archipelago that shifted southwestwards when a giant earthquake hit on December 26, geologists said on Wednesday.

The state-run Centre for Earth Science Studies (CESS) found six inhabited islands and one that boasts a volcano moved ‘a few metres’ after the undersea quake that measured 9.3 on the Richter Scale triggered deadly tsunamis.

“Computer models are showing an interesting relationship between star-quakes and earthquakes. Supernova, star-quakes and similar burst of energy in the Universe triggers earthquakes and tsunamis.

According to researchers, most of the large earthquakes and Tsunamis happened when there was a burst of energy somewhere in the cosmos. According to BBC, Astronomers say they have been stunned by the amount of energy released in a star explosion on the far side of our galaxy, 50,000 light-years away.

“‘Hush, don’t say the word ‘sea,’ it terrifies them,’ whispered schoolteacher Belinda Studel in a makeshift school in this tsunami-hit Indian Ocean island paradise where waves washed away most of the population.

The students Studel and fellow teachers were instructing in the thatched hut included many of the 44 children orphaned in Katchal which bore the brunt of the tidal waves triggered by a giant undersea earthquake off Indonesia.

“The earthquake that triggered Asia’s tsunami has moved, twisted and tilted the Andaman and Nicobar islands, raising some out of sea and sinking large parts of others.

Shifts in tectonic plates have submerged India’s southernmost point, split one island in two, destroyed beaches and villages, fuelled social pressures and even threatened the habitat of an ancient and isolated tribe of hunter-gatherers.

They believe that the “structures” could be the remains of an ancient and once-flourishing port city in the area housing the famous 1200-year-old rock-hewn temple.

“The first major assessment of the environmental damage caused by the Asian tsunami paints a picture of polluted water supplies, smashed livelihoods and damaged wildlife.

But in areas where natural barriers – such as mangrove swamps and coral reefs – had not been degraded by human activity, there was less devastation, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) report.

“Indian divers have found more evidence of an ancient port city, apparently revealed by December’s tsunami.

Other relics were revealed when the powerful waves washed away sand as they smashed into the Tamil Nadu coast.

“UK scientists have released images of the ocean floor near the epicentre of December’s giant Asian earthquake. They were obtained by the Royal Navy’s hydrographic survey ship HMS Scott.

The three-dimensional pictures detail the deformed seabed 150km (94 miles) off the Sumatran coast, and reveal huge underwater landslides.

“Thirty-eight days after the tsunami shook South Asia, nine people were rescued from the Great Nicobar Island. They managed to survive with a little help from the island’s aboriginal tribe, the Shompens, after the tsunami swept away their village Pilobhabi, located on the islands west coast.

The group, comprising two young girls, two women, a 65-year-old man and four youth, struggled eastwards through thick jungles and were found 39 km from Campbell Bay, the island’s headquarter town.

“A 65 million year old tsunami is still wreaking havoc in the scientific community, a New Mexico State University professor says.

The 300-foot-tall tsunami – an aftereffect of the giant meteor impact that some scientists think killed off the dinosaurs – scrambled fossils and rock and has made the event very hard to date, said Timothy Lawton, head of NMSU’s geology department.

“Full moon and other cosmic processes may have influenced the Earth to such extent that caused the mighty earthquakes and mammouth tsunami in South East Asia a month ago.

This revolutionary theory was developed by a Russian astronomer and quoted in Russian daily Nezavisimaia Gazeta.

“Doctors have warned that survivors of the Asian tsunami are at risk of a fungal infection which is frequently fatal, but hard to diagnose. The warning came after the infection was identified in an Australian man who had returned home after being injured in Sri Lanka during the catastrophe.

Given the difficulties faced by health services in the countries devastated by the tsunami, the doctors suggest that travellers returning to other nations could be a good predictor of diseases present in the most affected regions.

“The shock and awe resulting from the massive tsunami that hit Indian Ocean nations Dec. 26 has left many wondering what could have caused such a disaster and if there is anything humans can do to control or mitigate future events.

Some quickly suggested that an increase in the frequency of natural disasters like the tsunami were a harbinger of what we have in store due to the increase of Earth’s greenhouse gases resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.

“More than three centuries after a series of massive waves crashed onto the west coast of Vancouver Island, destroying villages and sweeping people out to sea, 14 native communities are asking to be moved to higher ground.

‘I think after Asia we do feel threatened,’ Robert Dennis, Chief of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, said yesterday. Today is the 305th anniversary of the Jan. 26, 1700, tsunami.

Chief Dennis said that when the Huu-ay-aht, who number about 500 in a village near Bamfield, built a new community centre a few years ago, they abandoned the original building site near the ocean and moved it higher up the slope after an elder reminded them of the tsunami threat outlined in old stories.

The tsunami was triggered by an earthquake that ruptured the sea floor from California all the way north to mid-Vancouver Island. The devastation it caused had such an impact on native cultures that the story was largely mythologized, becoming a giant thunderbird battling a whale the size of a mountain. That became a motif of Pacific Northwest art, reflected in fearsome totem poles, longhouse paintings and haunting ceremonial masks.

“The Indonesian death toll from last month’s earthquake and tsunami disaster has risen more than 7,000 to 173,981, the health ministry said Sunday. It said 173,741 people had died in Aceh, with another 240 in the neighbouring province of North Sumatra. Another 7,249 people are classified as missing.

“Caught up in the destruction of the tsunami was the Maritime Museum in Galle which suffered partial damage to property and irreparable damage to 75 per cent of valuable artefacts.

“Over 170 thousand people were killed in the mammoth earthquake and the giant tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Despite the continuing technical progress, the mankind is still defenseless in front of the power of nature.

Numerous respectable institutes in a lot of countries of the globe study oceans and the Earth’s depth, but it seems that they are unable to protect the world from the natural rage.

The phenomenon of tsunami is known from ancient times. According to manuscripts, a giant wave destroyed the town of Amnisos on Crete in the year 1400 A.C.. The tsunami generated from the eruption of the Volcano of Santorini in the Bronze Age washed away the vast sea-based Minoan civilization.

“A false alarm about an imminent tsunami approaching the southern coast of Chile which developed into an early Monday morning panic causing the death of a woman and several injured was described by the country’s Interior Minister Jose Miguel Insulza as a ‘macabre joke’.

Mr. Insulza who is acting Chilean president since Mr. Ricardo Lagos is in an overseas visit of Africa and Asia, said the authorities haven’t so far established the origin of the rumour and its tragic consequences.

The false alarm at 02:00 hours Monday morning in Chile’s second city Concepción and neighbouring towns panicked 12,000 people who fled their homes in whatever vehicle they could catch for higher ground.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — “All the tsunami detectives over here keep referring to a guy in Seattle named Brian Atwater.

Most Pacific Northwest residents likely have heard that a massive magnitude 9 earthquake, much like the Sumatran quake on Dec. 26, spawned a killer tsunami off the Washington and Oregon coast more than 300 years ago.

What might not be as well known is why we know this, and how recently it was that we didn’t and were at risk of a similar deadly surprise.

‘It really wasn’t until Kenji Satake’s paper in 1996 that they all finally shut up about it,’ Atwater, a U.S. Geological Survey geologist and ‘paleoseismologist’ at the University of Washington, said in an interview about his work in Seattle.

The normally mild-mannered Atwater still gets irked thinking about what he had to go through to get his ideas accepted.

The elk seemed to know, Mike Miller said.

Moments before a light earthquake struck beneath western Prince William Sound on Thursday morning, Miller’s small band of elk at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center near Portage gathered in a group and began running — to no place in particular, he said.

‘These guys were just trotting along like they were migrating,’ said Miller, the center’s director. ‘They knew they should be scared and stressed’.

He initially thought a wolf or other predator was in the area. But as Miller watched the suddenly restless animals from his window, he said, the quake struck with a jolt.

POOMPUHAR, India (AP) — For generations, the people of Poompuhar have spoken of the days when their sleepy fishing town was the capital of a powerful kingdom, and traders came from Rome, Greece and Egypt to deal in pearls and silk.

Then, more than 1,500 years ago, it was gone. The thriving town, according to ancient Tamil-language texts, was ‘kodalkol’ — ‘swallowed by the sea’.

Perhaps, archaeologists and historians thought, the sea water had gradually risen. Or, some think now, perhaps it was something else.

‘Nobody knew what had happened,’ said Murugaiyan, a 38-year-old fisherman whose family has long talked of a long-gone kingdom. On December 26, though, it all became clear to him, when the tsunami slammed into coastlines across Asia and Africa.

How the story started:

1. Scientific research was published about a fault line on La Palma and the possibility of a landslide being caused by future volcanic activity.

2. Theoretical projections were made as to the circumstances under which the fault could cause a major landslide.

3. A computer model was made which showed that under specific circumstances a landslide could cause a tidal wave which might reach the Atlantic Coast of the USA, the Caribbean, the northern and western coasts of the South American continent, West Africa and the Western coasts of Europe.

4. A television program was made based on the research and the speculations and a vary large helping of dramatic effects.

5. The general public believed it. The media keeps repeating the speculation as if it is fact.

“The South Asian tsunami disaster has spawned many conspiracy theories including prior knowledge by governments and an underwater nuclear explosion by superpowers in order to seize control of the region.

“The South Asian earthquake that spawned deadly tsunami waves also shifted water levels by at least three feet in a geologically sensitive Virginia well some 9,600 miles away from the epicentre, researchers say.

“Aerial images of tsunami-battered coastlines suggest the world map may be changed forever, with chunks of land sinking into the sea. But did the quake and the killer wave it spawned really significantly reshape the Indian Ocean’s outline? Scientists say probably not.

“To the ancient Tamil world natural calamities like the tsunami that hit the east coast on 26 December 2004 is not unknown,” says professor A.Shanmugathas, head of the department of Tamil, Jaffna University.

It means communities may be reliant on outside aid for the foreseeable future. Reports from across the stricken region suggest salt water filled wells and invaded porous rocks which communities depend on for their water supply.

At least 150,000 people were killed after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake shook south east Asia on Sunday 26 December and spawned a huge tsunami. The enormous wave pounded coastal regions in 12 countries, with Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand the worst affected.

Water experts are now warning that, in the long run, the salt invasion may prove almost as destructive to the land as the tsunami itself. It could leave some communities dependent on outside aid for food and water for months or years to come.

There are widespread reports from across the stricken region that seawater has filled wells, invaded the porous rocks on which communities depend for water, and poisoned soils. Even as far away as Somalia in east Africa, hundreds of wells used by coastal villages are now poisoned with salt or have been buried by sand washed inland by the giant waves.

He then took out his bow and shot an arrow toward the rescue chopper. It was a signal the Sentinelese have sent out to the world for millennia: They want to be left alone. Isolated from the rest of the world, the tribesmen needed to learn nature’s sights, sounds and smells to survive.

Government officials and anthropologists believe that ancient knowledge of the movement of wind, sea and birds may have saved the five indigenous tribes on the Indian archipelago of Andaman and Nicobar islands from the tsunami that hit the Asian coastline Dec. 26.

“The tribals get wind of impending danger from biological warning signals like the cry of birds and change in the behavioural patterns of marine animals. They must have run to the forests for safety. No casualties have been reported among these five tribes,” ASI Director Dr V R Rao told newsmen today.

This has promted the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI) to propose its immediate documentation to save coastal populations from similar disasters in future. His team in the badly-hit islands reported the well being of all five aborigines tribes — Jarwas, Onges, Shompens, Sentenelese and Great Andamanese.

Well known marine archaeologist SR Rao worked on Dwarka for 14 years with the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa. Talking to TOI from Bangalore, Rao says, “We can’t rule out the possibility of a tsunami drowning ancient Dwarka as the town was inundated by some sea activity. There are shlokas which talk of the suddenness of the incident and the gravity of the calamity.”

The Bhagvat Purana mentions “Ete ghora mahotpata Dwarvatyam yamaketavaha. Muhoorthamapi na atra no yadu pungava”.

“The earth was ringing like a bell,” said observatory head Jim Kauahikaua.

Geologists are using a relatively new term for the phenomenon that caused such massive vibrations. They call it a ‘megathrust earthquake’.

No one was around to see the waves, debris and sediment that engulfed the shoreline (about where Interstate 95 now sits) and plowed across to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Scientists today are learning more about its cause and lingering effects.

According to the Russian scientists, the number of earthquakes in the earth has increased exponentially over the past few years, a phenomenon not seen in modern human history.