More handpicked essays just for you.
Various strategies to tackle natural and man made disaster
Tsunami causes and effects 300 words
The cause and effect of tsunamis
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
The Tsunami Disaster
At 0059 GMT on 26 December 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.
THE EARTHQUAKE
Two hundred and forty kilometres (150 miles) off the coast of Sumatra,
deep under the ocean floor, at the boundary between two of the world's
tectonic plates, lay a 1,200km (745 miles) trench called the
Andaman-Sumatran subduction zone.
At about the same speed as your fingernails grow, the lower plate,
carrying India, is being forced or subducted beneath the upper plate,
carrying most of South-East Asia, dragging it down, causing huge
stresses to build up.
These stresses were released on 26 December. Shaking from this giant
mega-thrust earthquake woke people from sleep as far away as Thailand
and the Maldives.
Unlike the more frequent strike-slip earthquakes of Kobe or Los
Angeles, which last for a matter of seconds, subduction zone quakes
last for several minutes.
The shaking during the Indonesian event went on for eight minutes.
Nobody knows how many died in the actual quake itself, but scientists
have since visited the nearby island of Simueleu and found something
astonishing.
The whole island has been tilted by the force of the earthquake,
causing coral, submerged beneath the ocean for thousa...
... middle of paper ...
...ique geography, being the tips of
underwater volcanoes and without a continental shelf to push the wave
height up, the tsunami just washed through.
Coral reefs are also thought to have protected the country, acting
like a giant underwater colander, stripping the waves of energy.
As the waves left the Maldives, they passed through a narrow gap
between the island chains, focusing their energy directly at Somalia,
where 300 people lost their lives.
In Kenya, the waves, when they hit were small; their energy further
removed by the land masses of the Seychelles and Diego Garcia.
They had also seen the news reports and evacuated the beaches; only
one person died.
The last victim of a natural disaster that had claimed 300,000 with
hundreds still unaccounted for.
Information obtained from www.bbc.co.uk/news