OLEAN -- The new year begins. A time to consider the prospects of 2005 and reflect upon 2004.
Our thoughts turn to life and death -- and the Christmas tsunami that devastated countries rimming the Indian Ocean.
It is difficult to wrap one's mind around a natural catastrophe that in seven hours killed more than twice as many human beings as America lost in Vietnam during a decade.
Before last week, most Americans probably thought the word tsunami had something to do with a sushi restaurant. It is Japanese. "Tsu" means harbor in Japanese. "Nami" means wave. Thus, a huge wave that hits land after being formed by a submarine event. No, not the boat -- "submarine" meaning something that occurred underneath the ocean surface, such as a volcanic eruption.
In this case, it was a mammoth earthquake off the northern tip of Sumatra, caused by a violent shift in tectonic plates -- the giant slabs that form the earth's crust. It was a 9.0 on the Richter scale, the grading by which the magnitudes of earthquakes are measured.
The Richter scale goes from 1 to 10. Each step indicates an earthquake approximately 60 times more powerful than the last number. So when you read about a 7.0 quake that causes immense destruction in California, think of this: Seismologically speaking, the one in Indonesia was about 3,600 times more powerful than those shakers that casually wreck freeways and buildings in Los Angeles and Oakland. The energy unleashed by the Sumatra quake was roughly equivalent to an explosion of 32 billion tons of TNT.
There are hundreds of earthquakes of varying dimensions on the planet each day. Geographers estimate a 9.0 comes along maybe three times a century. This one was perfectly situated for causing death and destruction.
It is almost impossible to comprehend the size and speed of a wave that covered a sea distance 20 percent again as wide as the entire United States in less than a normal night's sleep.
The images are stark and frightening. The front page of The New York Times on New Year's Eve carried a color photograph that sticks in the brain. It is filled with energy. It is of a beach in Thailand. There are seven humans depicted. They are identified as tourists. By their body exertions, they all appear panic-stricken.
In the upper right, a big expensive yacht founders. In the lower left, three adult males race for shore with splashy strides. In the lower middle, what appears to be a father drags a son by the forearm. The son reaches behind to an apparent brother stumbling to catch up. They are knee deep in calm water. In the foreground, at the bottom of the photo, the presumptive mother -- who has prudently been on shore -- races toward them, her back to the camera, her arms pumping. Why are these people running for their lives? Then your eye shifts upward, and you see.
Horizontally, in the photo's near distance, two surging waves chase the human ashore. One is of the height a foolhardy, nay suicidal, surfer might think about challenging. The one behind it is immense -- an angry monster of white about to consume the yacht and the tiny humans.
The caption explains the ocean had receded drastically before the deadly wave struck. The curious male humans had obviously ventured farther and farther away from the beach to pursue the receding shoreline.
Everyone who looked at this photo in my company had the same thought: These people, vacationers who only moments before were happy and laughing, are all dead now.
The photo is accompanied by a masterful article by Andrew Revkin, who delivers a detailed, minute-by-minute account of scientists around the globe mapping the seismic event as it occurred, and their futile efforts to send warnings to a part of the world that has few sophisticated communications systems. They knew death was on the loose, but they didn't know who to call.
At about the time the photo described above was taken, writes the author, "Sumatra's shores were already a soup of human flotsam."
As with most natural disasters, there is much human folly therein.
The federal government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a Pacific Tsunami Warning Center set up in Hawaii for anticipating such disasters. Nations around the Pacific Rim benefit from this sophisticated setup. Scientists there were aware of the Sumatra earthquake about 15 minutes after it occurred, and they sent out a warning to 26 countries -- but coastal areas of nations on the Indian Ocean were not in the warning system. Duhhh. One would think coastal areas would be the first included in such a cautionary scheme.
An earthquake expert at the prestigious California Institute of Technology, Kerry Sieh had been studying the Sumatran tectonic plates for years and had found evidence of similar huge quakes and ocean-spanning tsunamis in 1797, 1833 and 1861. Only a year ago, he tried to persuade a United Nations board -- clumsily called the International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific -- to extend the warning network into the Indian Ocean and nations rimming it. In typical UN foot-dragging, the "coordination" group shrugged him off with a moronic resolution to set up "a sessional working group to prepare a recommendation to establish an intersessional working group to study the establishment" of such a warning system for the Indian Ocean rim. Lesson learned: Bureaucratic red tape kills.
Reactions to this calamitous event have been instructive.
At the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., which sponsors a Web site labeled Godhatesfags.com, thanks were given to God for the tsunami because it killed about 2,000 Swedish tourists, apparently a church protest against the liberal laws protecting homosexuals in that Scandinavian nation.
Christian speculation is rampant -- on the Internet, in chat rooms, in print and in private conversations -- that God in all his vengeance brought about the earthquake and ensuing tsunami as a lesson to the tens of thousands of Muslims killed in the disaster, a warning that he does not like that religion and the deadly violence of some of its adherents. Evidence cited by these claimants: the catastrophe occurred on Christ's birthday, exactly a year after a similar earthquake in Shiite Iran took 40,000 lives.
"God does not respect man and has every right to punish those that do not follow his teachings," wrote one such believer on Dec. 30 on the "cultural forum" Web site www.plus613.com under the headline "GOD vs. the muslims."
Others noted that vast numbers of Hindus and Buddhists were wiped out, too, so it couldn't be just an anti-Muslim getback by the Deity. One blogger opined the deadly tsunami may have hit the coast of India "as a punishment" for ancient temple carvings depicting sexual congress between humans and animals. Others pointed to the common insurance policy language describing such catastrophes as "an act of God."
The logic of such views eludes me. To me, monotheistic reasoning would indicate a benevolent God -- with millions of planets and galaxies and stars to look after -- probably would let humans do as they wished with the rules he set down, and then judge them upon death, not take the time to react to violations during their individual life spans. Sort of like George Burns in that movie "Oh, God!" a few years back.
If an all-powerful God is bent on earthly vengeance, why would he kill thousands and thousands of innocents just to punish a few transgressors?
One thing this fatal event will do is draw new attention to the scientific study of plate tectonics. Such a catastrophe is not outside the realm of speculation for either the East Coast or West Coast of the United States. The respected journal "Science" noted two months ago that a "slow earthquake" under Puget Sound has been going on since last February and has been tracked by geophysicists at Central Washington University.
They used Global Positioning System satellites to track the continuous -- and so far benevolent -- motion of tectonic plates deep below the Pacific Northwest. The state of Washington scientists believe such quiet events may occur in that region about eight times a decade.
Under the Atlantic Ocean, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge stretches from the North Pole to the South Pole. Iceland sits directly on top of it. A volcanic explosion as far away as the Canary Islands could send a tsunami 150 feet in height slamming into the East Coast, according to some studies. A 1755 earthquake in Portugal created a smaller tsunami that reached Florida, but didn't take many lives because very few people lived there.
The West Coast -- with its well-known vulnerability to earthquakes -- has the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in place, but there is no equivalent for the East Coast. Some scientists are noticing. A Florida Tech oceanographer named George Maul has written the White House, encouraging a tsunami warning system for the East Coast, noting the Sumatran event is "one more time, a wake-up call."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Jan. 4 2005 |