tsunamis

Mudslide

Situation: Your split-level Shangri-la with a view is about to head to the valley floor on the back of a mudslide.

The tsunami that struck Crescent City, California, on April 25, 1992, wasn't a destructive one -- the waves were relatively small, and no loss of life or significant damage resulted. But it was still an important tsunami event, in that it illustrated how quickly a wave can arrive at nearby coastal communities and how long the at-risk period can last. The tsunami occurred after a 7.1 earthquake shook the coast of Cape Mendocino on California's north coast, generating a series of tsunami waves.

Nearly four years after a series of disastrous tsunami waves struck coastlines bordering the Indian Ocean, a new Tsunami Early Warning System is up and running in Indonesia. Using a series of buoys linked to detectors that sit on the ocean floor, the new high-tech warning system will be able to detect an undersea earthquake and predict within minutes whether it will cause a tsunami.

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Over the past 1,300 years, the Nankai Trough, the 500-mile-long boundary between two tectonic plates off the southwestern coast of Japan, has been one of the worlds most active tsunami hotspots. Now an international team of scientists has embarked on a multiyear project to drill four miles down into the heart of this subterranean wave machine. The Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment, called Nantroseize, will be the first attempt to penetrate a tsunami-generating hotspot and could help scientists understand the source of the huge swells. We can monitor the ocean all we want, but well never understand why some earthquakes produce tsunamis and why others do not until we understand how faults work, says geophysicist Nathan Bangs of the University of Texas.

A German newspaper reported last week that 13-year-old Nico Marquardt corrected a few glitches in NASA's estimates regarding the chances of a certain asteroid colliding with Earth. NASA concluded that the Apophis space rock has only a 1 in 45,000 chance of knocking into us, but this school-kid announced that the space agency had missed a few zeros, suggesting that the probability is closer to 1 in 450. And while quite a few news reports backed him up, even claiming that NASA agreed Marquardt was correct, the space agency is sticking to its estimates.

While attending a conference in Phuket, Thailand, earlier this year, Eddie Bernard, the developer of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)s tsunami-monitoring network, was surprised to find that most residents had returned to the coastal city after the devastating tsunami of 2004, which killed 8,000 people in Thailand. Not only that, but they seemed prepared for the next one. Speaker towers loomed over the beach, ready to blast a warning in case a wave approached. Signs everywhere told people which way to flee.

Humans are fleeting visitors on this roiling rock in the universe. On December 26, 2004, at 58 minutes and 49 seconds past midnight GMT, Mother Earth reacquainted us with this immutable fact. For millions of years, a creeping slab of Earth´s crust—the India Plate—had been grinding headlong into a similarly stubborn chunk of rock called the Burma Plate. Like a clash of Brobdingnagian armies, millennia of pent-up kinetic energy suddenly exploded from the seabed, a scant 100 miles from Sumatra, Indonesia.