Mind-Boggling: The 2004 Sumatra Tsunami
That’s how Vasily Titov, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Tsunami Research described the aftermath of the largest tsunami on record, triggered by a 9.1-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean in the early hours of the day after Christmas 2004 — 20 years ago today.
More than a quarter- million people — at least a third of them children — lost their lives in the tsunami.
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The 9.1-magnitude earthquake struck at 7:59 a.m. Dec. 26, 2004, creating a rupture more than 600 miles long, 19 miles beneath the surface of the Bay of Bengal and then another 31 miles beneath the ocean floor. The shaking lasted for at least 10 minutes.
The tectonic plates in the area had been pushing against each other, building up pressure for thousands of years. The quake displaced the sea floor 10 yards horizontally and several yards vertically.
The movement of trillions of tons of rock resulted in the largest, most deadly tsunami on record.
Oceanside cities in Sumatra were the first to be hit — a 100-foot-tall rolling mountain of water swept through Banda Aceh leaving hardly any survivors. The NOAA’s Vasily Titov was part of a team of researchers that examined the devastation there. “It was as if somebody had taken an eraser and erased everything beneath the 20-meter line,” he told History.com. “The sheer scale of the destruction was just mind-boggling.”
From there, waves spread out at 500 mph across the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. In Thailand, nearly 5,400 people were killed, including 2,000 foreign tourists.
“It’s a wave,” Titov explained. “But from the observer’s standpoint, you wouldn’t recognize it was a wave. It’s more like the ocean turns into a whitewater river and floods everything in its path.”
Countries in southeast Africa — 3,000 milesaway and more than eight hours later — were hit strongly enough to cause fatalities and widespread property damage. People inIndonesia reported they saw animals fleeing for high ground several minutes before the tsunami arrived there. Very few animal bodies were found afterward.
No fewer than 17 countries in Southeastern and Southern Asia were affected. In addition to 227,899 deaths, the disaster displaced 1.7 million people and caused $13 billion in economic losses.
The United Nations conducted relief efforts after the disaster and then went on to lead efforts to upgrade schools, water and sanitation systems and other infrastructure to make them more tsunami-resistant.
The tsunami rips into Ao Nang, Thailand. Source: Wikimedia Commons
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The 2004 earthquake itself was bad enough: At magnitude 9.1 — the world’s third-largest earthquake since 1900 — the earthquake released energy equivalent to 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs.
It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Asia, the most powerful of the 21st century and the third-most powerful recorded since modern seismography began in 1900.
The tsunami — not the earthquake — was responsible for most of the damage and the deaths, the NOAA’s Center for Tsunami Research says.
The wave reached as high as 167 feet and caused flooding as far as 3 miles inland in some places. Communities were affected along the coasts of India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Seychelles and Somalia.
Part of the reason for the severity of the impact was because of the lack of an official tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean at the time.
Work began in January 2005 on the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System, which today consists of 25 seismographic stations, 26 tsunami information centers and six Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami — or DART — buoys. Sensor data is monitored by centers in Hawaii and Japan.