Chaos by number
Hat Rai Lay Beach 1 © fboosman, CC.
Sneha and I have been watching as the situation unfolded through this afternoon and as reported on BBC when a quake occurrence offshore Indonesia touched a Richter scale of magnitude 9.0! That’s as close call as you could get. I cannot begin to imagine what would that have created had it been directly on land. Devastation across the affected area in the South and SE Asia is enormous piling up a huge total in terms of loss of lives.
Surprisingly, KL has been shielded from this devastation (probably due to its geographical location as Sumatra island virtually shields Malaysian peninsular) and has experienced only minor shocks in the nearby areas (Thank God!). Residents and visitors of Penang haven’t been so lucky.
Update: Conventionally Tsunamis are considered low frequency shallow water waves generating wave periods of around 12-minutes. If Tsunamis were shallow water waves, how could they traverse such long distances to cause huge disasters in far away places like India, Srilanka and Mauritius from the position of the epicentre?
It appears to me that there have been a series of chain reaction to the initial quake that occurred offshore Indonesia. Iris seismic monitor seems to support this showing multiple levels of magnitude over an intermittent periods as the quake chain reaction moves northward and also suggesting how most of Malaysia, southern Indonesia and Singapore remain largely unaffected.
Update 2: My initial wonder on whether tsunamis could travel long distance is largely unfounded. In fact, they do travel great distances and still can cause serious damage. There’s no better example than this.
Unlike in the US, the regions seriously affected have had virtually no history of tsunamis (or may be we’ve had in the past — two instances off south-east India: one in 1881 and the other in 1941). Wow! the recurrence is pretty accurate: 60-63 years! So, are we to expect another such occurence around 2064?
In India, there are cyclone warning systems that use data from USGS satellites in realtime to pin-point and warn fishermen not to venture into sea. One of the projects even won a Stockholm Challenge award. I guess, it’s time to upgrade those systems to the next level.
Hi there! I have been following the events very closely too. Checkout what I had to say on my blog. What a sad way to end the year…
Dec 27, 04 at 01:20