NOAA INDONESIAN TSUNAMI

tsunami epicenter map

Dec. 26, 2004 — NOAA scientists acted quickly when a warning was issued about the powerful undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean that triggered a devastating tsunami. The NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii issued an information bulletin at 8:14 p.m. EST Saturday, indicating that a magnitude 8.0 earthquake had occurred off the west coast of Northern Sumatra.

Because the earthquake, reported to be one of the strongest in the world in the past 40 years, occurred in the Indian Ocean, not the Pacific, there was no threat of a tsunami to the West Coast of North America. (Click NOAA image for larger view of Indonesia tsunami epicenter map. Click here for high resolution version, which is a large file. Please credit “NOAA.”)

Within a few hours of learning of the tsunamis that killed thousands in Indonesia Saturday night, Vasily Titov, associate director of the Tsunami Inundation Mapping Efforts, or TIME, at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Wash., and his counterpart in Japan had created preliminary model estimates of the event.

(NOAA animation of Indonesia tsunami. Click here for QuickTime tsunami epicenter movie. Please credit "NOAA.)

A tsunami is a series of ocean waves generated by any rapid large-scale disturbance of the sea water. Most tsunamis are generated by earthquakes, but they may also be caused by volcanic eruptions, landslides, undersea slumps or meteor impacts.

In 1963 the term "tsunami" was adopted internationally to describe this natural phenomenon. A Japanese word, it is the combination of the characters tsu (harbor) and nami (wave). They are often mistakenly called “tidal waves.” However, the tides have nothing to do with the formation of tsunamis.

Source: NOAA

RELATED

• NOAA AND THE INDIAN OCEAN TSUNAMI - The U.S. has demonstrated the effectiveness of its warning system within the Pacific region. It has also demonstrated that the warning system can provide initial earthquake information to other nations and is most willing to share that information with all concerned.