Tsunami: the Aftermath

25 December 2004 Friday


After watching the show I noticed there were so many things that I didn't even realise. I read the news about Tsunami and all but such a feeling cannot be compared when you are watching the videos, as you can feel the agony and tension while watching the show. Tsunami is basically natural disaster as it is a huge wave causing floods and washes off many boats and cruises onto shore, also causes many injuries, casualties, deaths from drowning, and damages to home and properties and might cause some poorly built buildings to collapse, trapping the people living in them most those that are situated near to the sea. The waves will also cause fishes to be washed onto shore eventually die this may affect fishermen who catches fishes for living.

Economically countries affected will face a financial problems as they have to spend a lot of money just to repair the damages, rebuild the house and restore their properties back to the way it was. This will affect them as the money they have to use could have been used for future developments as well as compensation for victim's families and due to the disasters happening, many foreigners will tend to avoid such countries resulting in a decrease in tourism.

The Causes of Tsunami 

Tsunamis in general are mainly cause by Earthquakes, in the plate tectonic theory, the Earth's crust is broken up into many pieces known as plates, and these plates moves because they float on liquid within the mantle of the earth. When 2 crusts slide pass each other, no new plates are formed nor destroyed but because of the violent friction that causes when they pass each other, it will result in an earthquake to occur (the movement of these 2 plates is called the conservative plate movement.)

When the movement occurs underneath or near the ocean, a large earthquake is produced and thus a tsunami. The deep ocean trenches off the coasts of Alaska, the Kuril Islands, Russia,, and South America are well known for their violent underwater earthquakes and as the source area for destructive Pacific-wide tsunamis.

However for Tsunami to occur, earthquakes must occur underneath or near the ocean, be large and create movements in the sea floor. The earthquake's magnitude and water depth in the region of tsunami generation, the amount of vertical motion of the sea floor, the velocity of such motion, and this allow the energy transferred from the earth's crust to ocean water creates the tsunami building it up and thus released.



 After effect in Japan

As I was doing this blog and browsing facebook, I came across this interesting video which my friend posted and I felt its really interesting as I too am a fan of manga and anime (not really bout power rangers and kamen riders) but still the video showed a museum built by Shōtarō Ishinomori, Ishinomaki, Miyagi, honoring him and featured his works famous for his manga and anime legend which has done many popular anime such a Cyborg 009 which I remember watching on Kids central when I was young haha~

During the Tsunami, the city was badly hit by the March 11, 2011 tsunami, and the museum was not spared the devastating waters but fortunately it survived which was quite amazing as in the video you can see the the debris and the damage was left outside the building.

Interesting Solutions 

I came across an interesting finding that during the cause of the Boxing Day Tsunami, scientific studies were released which claimed that the damage to coastal communities had been less in places where there was a barrier of trees or coastal vegetation.  As one fact while watching the movie, the main character realise, why is it that the strong buildings are destroyed but the thin feeble palm trees still stand?
 
It shows that as the waves hit the barrier of trees or mangroves etc, the vegetation actually absorbs the impact of the waves as it tries to pass the barrier in a result decrease and deduce in power of impact therefore protecting the livehood near it.

But there are certain important variables, like the distance of a village from the shore, the height of the village above sea level or the shape of the seabed in concentrating the tsunami’s power. All this factors may have to be put into consideration and thus cannot fully rely on trees though in a good sense this will help globally but realistically speaking maybe a difficult task as the world seem to be lacking space as more trees are cut down for logging, agriculture, food etc. 

However there is a chinese martial art saying, in comparison to a solid building and a tree, using an analogy of a stick - "A strong stiff stick can break easily but a flexible stick is hard to break."