TSUNAMI

Tsunami

Tsunamis are considered to be dangerous because they are the strongest waves that can destroy the lives of the people it hits . For the past two decades , tsunamis have already fatally swept 4 ,000 people and hit their bodies harshly back to land or the debris that it carried along with it Lucky survivors mostly get broken limbs out of their experience with a tsunami . Some who are not rescued in time lose their arms or legs due to the gangrene set by sea water on their wounds . Still , others lose p

What is a Tsunami

Some do refer to tsunamis as tidal waves but they are completely different because of its source . Tidal waves are caused by the moon or sun 's gravitational force and happen twice daily as what we normally call high and low tides . Wind blown waves that are generated by the sea breeze are also different from tsunamis because these only affect a shallow portion of the ocean

Tsunamis are an after effect of major geographical changes on land or under the sea . These could be caused by undersea earthquakes , volcanic eruptions , meteorite impacts or underwater landslides . A wave can start of as just a few meters high in the ocean 's deep waters and can extend to more than 750 kilometers and still become undetected because of the slight slope it creates . However , its speed can exceed 700 kilometers per hour or can be as fast as a Boeing 747 . Although deep ocean waters do not easily show a great change when these occurrences happen , the effect of the force can be fierce when the tsunami nears shallow waters .Historical References to Tsunamis

A brief review of history indicates that Hawaii had been struck by twelve devastating tsunamis since 1895 . It is believed that the worst one that happened in 1946 , claimed 159 Hawaiians . This fatal event was created by geographical changes as far distant as in Alaska 's Aleutian Islands which were 3 ,700 kilometers away . There are also records that suggest that just one of the 34 tsunamis that struck Indonesia in the past decade killed around 30 ,000 Indonesians who were within 120 kilometers away when the Krakatoa volcano erupted and generated waves as high as 12 storey buildings . Statistics prove that the most devastating tsunamis are those whose sources are just 200 kilometers away from shore

How Tsunamis are Formed

Tsunamis undergo three stages of development which overlap each other The first part is what we call generation ' This is the stage wherein a geographical disturbance happens and causes a disturbance in the water column . Most of the time , this is caused by an earthquake under the sea . This usually happens when crustal plates slip past one another inside the earth . The next stage is propagation ' which is how the seismic energy moves the water after the event of an earthquake This can be analogous to the shaking that we feel but in this case is happening under the sea...