Acehtsunami

The people of Tipperary who contributed €150,000 to the Irish Red Cross following the 2005 Asian tsunami have been encouraged that the money collected was spent on vital projects in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

Following a confession this week that a bank account containing the €150,000 collected by the Tipperary branch of the Red Cross for tsunami relief lay untouched for three years until it was discovered in 2008 during a national inspection by the Red Cross headquarters, members of the Tipperary branch said all the money donated in Tipperary was spent on tsunami relief.

This week Tipperary branch members Tony Lawlor, who is the working Vice chairman of the Irish Red Cross and the Tipperary branch chairperson Ellen Keane, made statements thanking people for their contributions and informed them that the money had been drawn down as required over a five year period to carry out a number of major humanitarian projects.

“Due to an administrative error, the funds lodged into the Tipperary bank account remained there untouched. When this was observed it was immediately used as part of the ongoing work for tsunami relief. It is significant to note that Irish Red Cross humanitarian relief and projects in countries affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunami were carried out from 2005 when the calamity struck and are ongoing with funds from the Irish public still helping communities in Indonesia, the Maldives and Sri Lanka.

The continents and sea floor that wrap the earth’s surface are part of a world-wide system of plates that are in movement. These movements are quite slow, only an inch or two per year. Earthquakes occur where the edges of plates run into one another. Such boundaries are called fault lines or faults. Sometimes the forces along faults can build-up over long periods of time so that when the rocks finally break an earthquake occurs.

Examples of features produced by forces released along plate edge faults are the Andes Mountains in South America (on land) and the Aleutian Trench near Alaska (under water). When powerful, rapid faulting occurs beneath or near the ocean, a large earthquake is produced and, possibly, a tsunami.The deep ocean trenches off the coasts of Alaska, the Kuril Islands, Russia, and South America are well prone to violent underwater earthquakes and as the source area for destructive Pacific-wide tsunamis.

The tsunami generating process is more complicated than a unexpected push against the column of ocean water. The earthquake’s magnitude and depth, water depth in the region of tsunami generation, the amount of vertical motion of the sea floor, the velocity of such motion, whether there is instantaneous slumping of sediments and the efficiency with which energy is transferred from the earth’s crust to ocean water are all part of the generation mechanism.

Oahu’s tsunami evacuation maps will be simplified for the first time in 19 years, in response to the updated ocean-floor data.The city Department of Emergency Management will clutch public outreach workshops on the 21 maps outlining zones that must be abandoned. That’s two more regions than in the 1991 set of maps.

Zones with the most important expanded evacuation area include Waikiki, downtown Honolulu, Maili and Honolulu Harbor. City officials added two more maps that did not have an emigration plan: Pearl Harbor and Kaneohe Bay.

Overall, more land is wrapped by the evacuation zones. But some areas, such as Sandy Beach, saw their evacuation zones minimize, Kaku said.

University scientists using Global Positioning System (GPS) software developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., have shown that GPS can determine, within minutes, whether an earthquake is big enough to generate an ocean-wide tsunami. This NASA-funded technology can be used to provide faster tsunami warnings.

A team led by Dr. Geoffrey Blewitt of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology and Seismological Laboratory, University of Nevada, Reno, demonstrated that a large quake’s true size can be determined within 15 minutes using GPS data. This is much faster than is possible with current methods.

“Tsunami warning is a race against time,” said co-author Dr. Seth Stein, Department of Geological Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. “Tsunamis travel at jet speed, so warning centers must accurately decide, within minutes, whether to issue alerts. This has to be done fast enough for the warning to be distributed to authorities in impacted areas so they can implement response plans. Together with seismometer and ocean buoy data, GPS adds another tool that can improve future tsunami danger assessments.”

A NASA-led research team has successfully demonstrated for the first time elements of a prototype tsunami prediction system that quickly and accurately assesses large earthquakes and estimates the size of resulting tsunamis.

After the magnitude 8.8 Chilean earthquake on Feb. 27, a team led by Y. Tony Song of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used real-time data from the agency’s Global Differential GPS (GDGPS) network to successfully predict the size of the resulting tsunami. The network, managed by JPL, combines global and regional real-time data from hundreds of GPS sites and estimates their positions every second. It can detect ground motions as small as a few centimeters.

“This successful test demonstrates that coastal GPS systems can effectively be used to predict the size of tsunamis,” said Song. “This could allow responsible agencies to issue better warnings that can save lives and reduce false alarms that can unnecessarily disturb the lives of coastal residents.”

The twin STEREO spacecraft confirmed their reality in February 2009 when sunspot 11012 unexpectedly erupted. The blast hurled a billion-ton cloud of gas (a coronal mass ejection, or CME) into space and sent a tsunami racing along the sun’s surface.

STEREO recorded the wave from two positions separated by 90 degrees, giving researchers an unprecedented view of the event.

“It was definitely a wave,” says Spiros Patsourakos of George Mason University, lead author of a paper reporting the finding in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Not a wave of water, but a giant wave of hot plasma and magnetism.”

Tsunamis this large don’t happen on Earth. A large solar flare from an Earth-sized sunspot produced a tsunami-type shock wave that was spectacular even for the Sun.

The tsunami wave was captured moving out from active region AR 10930 by the Optical Solar Patrol Network (OSPAN) telescope in New Mexico, USA. The resulting shock wave, known technically as a Moreton wave, compressed and heated up gasses including hydrogen in the photosphere of the Sun, causing a momentarily brighter glow.

The image was taken in a very specific red color emitted exclusively by hydrogen gas. The rampaging tsunami took out some active filaments on the Sun, although many re-established themselves later. The solar tsunami spread at nearly one million kilometers per hour, and circled the entire Sun in a matter of minutes.

On May 18, 1980, the upper 460 meters of Mount St. Helens failed and detached in a huge landslide. This released the pressure on the magma trapped beneath the summit bulge which exploded as a lateral blast, which then released the over-pressure on the magma chamber and resulted in a plinian eruption.

One lobe of the avalanche surged onto Spirit Lake, causing a megatsunami which pushed the lake waters in a series of surges, which reached a maximum height of 260 metres above the summit bulge pre-eruption water level (~975 m asl).

Above the upper limit of the tsunami, trees lie where they were knocked down by the pyroclastic surge; below the limit, the felled trees and the surge deposits were removed by the megatsunami and deposited in Spirit Lake.

While workers at sea continue to react to the massive BP oil leak, there are substances beneath the surfaces of the waters and sand that may create problems in the future. Numerous recent Internet reports and e-mails notify that an enormous methane gas bubble underneath the Gulf of Mexico seabed could generate a massive explosion, sending a deadly tsunami barreling toward the coast.
Gary Byerly, Professor of Geology at Louisiana State University, doesn’t get the claims supported by science. “I think the rumors are much unfounded,” Byerly said. “For one thing, the methane is not actually a gas at that depth, due to extreme pressure. It’s really in a glutinous or semi-solid state, so it’s not going to gather into a giant gas bubble.
“It’s extremely improbable that something like (an explosion and tsunami) could happen. I just don’t know how this bubble could form. You’re not going to have an explosion that deep underwater because there’s not sufficient oxygen down there.”
Marine biologist Heather Reed says heavy equipment used to move oily sand on Pensacola Beach may only be making clear out more difficult or less efficient. Gulf Breeze News file photo BP verified May 21 that the well is leaking methane, which sparked fears. An earlier BP survey also concluded that a methane bubble created the initial blowout of the wellhead in April.

Tsunami (pronounced soo-NAH-mee) is a Japanese word. Tsunamis are quite common in Japan and many thousands of Japanese have been killed by them in latest centuries.
• An earthquake generates a tsunami if it is of adequate force and there is violent movement of the earth causing substantial and sudden displacement of a huge amount of water.

• A tsunami is not a single wave but a sequence of waves, also known as a wave train. The first wave in a tsunami is not necessarily the most destructive. Tsunamis are not tidal waves.
• Tsunami waves can be very long (as much as 60 miles, or 100 kilometers) and be as far as one hour apart. They are able to cross entire oceans without great loss of energy. The Indian Ocean tsunami moved as much as 3,000 miles (nearly 5,000 kilometers) to Africa, arriving with sufficient force to kill people and destroy property.