Tsunami

“ There are only 26,000 tsunami displaced as opposed to the 350,000 you assert. More than the 250,000 you cite were displaced during the 2006/2007 fighting, but only 188,000 of them have not gone back to their places of origin. ”

“ NO - REPEAT NO - WATCH OR WARNING IS IN EFFECT. Revised magnitude based analysis of mantle waves. This earthquake is located outside of the Pacific. No destructive tsunami threat exists for the Pacific basin based on historical earthquake and tsunami data. ”

“ Hadley, however,
'Qualified scientific opinion is in good agreement that the possibility of triggering a large earthquake by CANNIKIN is remote, but real. * * * Variation of technical opinion from this position is minor.' Hadley memo, p. 6.
The second seismic effect which might result from CANNIKIN is a tsunami, or tidal wave. ”

“ On this first day of a new year, we join the world in feeling enormous sadness over a great human tragedy. Last Sunday, an earthquake and violent tsunamis struck the nations that surround the Indian Ocean. The carnage is of a scale that defies comprehension, with over 100,000 deaths reported. ”

“ Americans continue to mourn the victims of the devastating tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. More than 150,000 lives are now feared lost, including tens of thousands of children.
Communities have been decimated from Indonesia, to Thailand, to India, to East Africa. Thousands are missing, or injured; and millions are thought to be homeless, or without food and clean water. ”

“ A wave strikes the bow and races the full length of the vessel, tearing everything loose it can rip from its fastenings. It is sickening. I am writing this in the very midst, the centre, of the worst kind of storm one can encounter at sea. The men are shouting and cursing, the animals pawing and uttering plaintive sounds.
“We don’t know where we are. We know we are heading north-east to get away from ragged reefs which lie to the north of Luzon. We are steaming directly in the face of the typhoon and make no progress. The barometer has fallen twelve points since noon. ”

“ Many a strong ship lies at the bottom of the sea, where she was sent by just such a storm as we are about to pass through, and many another has barely escaped. I was once on a ship in the China seas, when the captain told the passengers that it would be a miracle if we remained half an hour longer afloat. But hardly had he done speaking when the wind fell, the storm abated, and we were safe. The typhoon is to these waters what the hurricane is to the West Indies; it is liable to blow at any time between April and September, and is often fearfully destructive. ”

“ The tornado, the simooms, the dust-whirlwind, the fire-storm, even the slow and sluggish storm which moves on our Western plains as the laboring wheel of the steamship buried in a heavy sea, all attest that a body cannot move on the earth's surface in a straight line. It is not more true with us that the Gulf Stream turns to the eastward, the Polar Stream to the westward, and the equatorial currents to the northward, than that every air-current, in obedience to the same law, should turn to the right of the line along which from any cause it is called to move. ”

“ But, according to Lieutenant Davis, the forms, extent, and distribution of sand-bars and banks are principally determined, not by winds and waves, but by tides.
Our host said that you would be surprised, if you were on the beach when the wind blew a hurricane directly on to it, to see that none of the drift-wood came ashore, but all was carried directly northward and parallel with the shore as fast as a man can walk, by the in-shore current, which sets strongly in that direction at flood-tide. The strongest swimmers also are carried along with it, and never gain an inch toward the beach. ”

“ Hot and violent winds, exceeding the fiercest tornado that ever blows, and downpours of rain such as our milder, slower earth to-day knows nothing of, might have assailed us. The water of the downpour would have rushed by us, muddy with the spoils of the rocks, coming together into torrents, cutting deep gorges and canyons as they hurried past to deposit their sediment in the earliest seas. Through the clouds we should have glimpsed a great sun moving visibly across the sky, and in its wake and in the wake of the moon would have come a diurnal tide of earthquake and upheaval. ”

“ If the origin of the shock is under the sea near the coast any upheaval of the bottom of the ocean that frequently accompanies an earthquake, gives rise to a great tidal wave that frequently inundates the neighboring coast with much damage.
“While the phenomena of earthquakes and volcanoes are usually associated in the same region, one cannot fairly be said to be the cause of the other. Both are rather effects of a common cause, or rather of common causes, the chief of which is the shrinking and readjustment of the rocky strata within the earth. ”

“ The flood, indeed, had no terrors for us; we could get off at ten minutes' notice, and the more water the better we liked it. It meant an increasing current and the obliteration of the treacherous shingle-beds that so often threatened to tear the bottom out of our canoe.
Contrary to our expectations, the wind did not go down with the sun. It seemed to increase with the darkness, howling overhead and shaking the willows round us like straws. Curious sounds accompanied it sometimes, like the explosion of heavy guns, and it fell upon the water and the island in great flat blows of immense power. ”

“ The tide went down the beach, the typhoon whirled its raging center off to sea, and the tropic moon shone out, lighting up, between the beach and barrier reef, a heaving stretch of oily lagoon on which appeared and disappeared hundreds of shark-fins quickly darting, and, out on the barrier reef, perched high, yet still pounded by the ocean combers raised by the storm, a fragment of ship's stern with a stump of mizzenmast. ”

“ The boatswain tried to explain; the sounds of a great scuffle surprised them: and the mighty shocks, reverberating awfully in the black bunker, kept them in mind of their danger. When the boatswain threw open the door it seemed that an eddy of the hurricane, stealing through the iron sides of the ship, had set all these bodies whirling like dust: there came to them a confused uproar, a tempestuous tumult, a fierce mutter, gusts of screams dying away, and the tramping of feet mingling with the blows of the sea. ”

“ It is very subject to seismic disturbances; and the ordinary consequences of a sharp earthquake shock might be seriously complicated by its effect on a broad sheet of water. Moreover, the Indian Ocean lies within the region of typhoons; and if, at the height of an inundation, a hurricane from the south-east swept up the Persian Gulf, driving its shallow waters upon the delta and damming back the outflow, perhaps for hundreds of miles up-stream, a diluvial catastrophe, fairly up to the mark of Hasisadra's, might easily result. ”

“ The lightning is continually playing, and I shouldn't be surprised if we are on the edge of a cyclone, but with a big ship like this, and a captain who knows his business, there is nothing to be afraid of. These cyclones, which are called typhoons in the China seas, are curious storms which twist round and round in a circle, all the time progressing onward too, and the danger is in getting into the middle of one, for there, as you may imagine, the wind comes from all quarters at once, and the waves are piled up on all sides like huge overhanging pyramids. ”

“ The warning brings to their minds raging seas and screaming gales, relatives and 6 friends lost in other great storms that have roared out of the tropics, ships going down and buildings being torn apart.
Ahead of the storm, the sea becomes angry. Huge rollers break on the beaches with a booming sound. In the distance, a long, low, angry cloud appears on the horizon. If the cloud grows and puts out scud and squalls, spitting rain, the warning flags flutter in the gusts and the big winds will strike the coast with terrible destruction. ”

“ Sometimes the level plain is broken up into savage ridges and awful canons, along whose arid bottoms no water streams. As you stagger through their chaotic bottoms, you see vast boulders poised overhead, tottering to a fall; a shiver of earthquake, a breath of hurricane, and they come crashing and splintering in destruction down. Along the sides of these acclivities extend long, level lines and furrows, marks of where the ocean flowed ages ago. ”

“ I had just been looking from the veranda through the glass at the boats, when a huge wave picked up the launch and threw her on the beach. There she had rolled about a little, and then dug herself into the sand, while the tide fell and the wind changed. Next day the cyclone had passed, but the swell was still very heavy. Equipped with everything necessary to float the launch, we marched along the beach, which was beaten hard by the waves. We had to cross a swollen river on an improvised raft; to our satisfaction we found the boat quite unhurt, not even the cargo being damaged ”

“ If the vessel ran on a rock, what man could swim through the breakers that still divided us from the coast? The most dangerous spot in a storm is just where the waves are hurled revolving against the shore, as if they were trying to scoop it out and drag away whole tracts of earth into the gulfs below. The blow of a wave as it [Pg 221] dashes forward and its gluttonous fury as it rushes back again, is such as no human strength can stand against.
At last, after some hours of mortal anguish, the keel of the Rayo came upon a sand bank and there she stuck. ”

“ Every now and again a prodigious height of steam-like spray would go yelling up with the sound of a giantess’s scream into the flying darkness from some pipe-like conduit in the porous rock. These columns of water were so luminous with fire, so white with the crystalline smoke into which they were converted by the incalculable weight of the sea sweeping into the apertures, that, dark as it was, one saw them instantly and clearly. They soared with hurricane speed in a straight line, then were arched by the gale like a palm ”

“ Mariners say that in a severe typhoon the ocean is quite smooth, owing to the inability of the waves to form against the irresistible force of the wind. It is fortunate for them that such is the case, as they could not possibly survive the combined action of the cyclone and the great waves together.
For three or four hours the wind continued to increase, and the waters to assume the shapes we have seen. The barometer had fallen steadily, and everything indicated that the arrival of the steamer at Shanghai, or at any other port, was by no means a matter of certainty. ”

“ It is not the fury of the storm alone that they dread, but it is the “ugly sea” which these storms raise. The current of the stream running in one direction, and the wind blowing in another, creates a sea that is often frightful. In the month of December, 1853, the fine new steam-ship San Francisco sailed from New York with a regiment of United States troops on board, bound around Cape Horn for California. She was overtaken, while crossing the Gulf Stream, by a gale of wind, in which she was terribly crippled. ”

“ Old Sandstone was always given to perspiring copiously.
He repeated:
"It has come to pass, with a whole train of precursory or concomitant phenomena: submarine eruptions, whirlpools, boats and ships hurled into the air and drawn under by the most terrible suction; and then seismic tremors, more or less marked, cyclones, waterspouts and the devil's own mischief; and then a cataclysm of an earthquake. And immediately afterwards, indeed at the same moment, the shooting up of one lip of the fault, projecting from one coast to the other, over a width of seventy or eighty miles. ”

“ Then, when a tornado approached, I should place a man at each side of the sail, put the men into balloons, send them up, and spread the sail directly across the route of the approaching cyclone. When it arrived, it would strike the sail, of course; there would be a momentary flapping and jerking around, and in a minute or two I should have that hurricane comfortably packed away in the volcano, suppose we say. A man would then be upon the spot, of course, to drive a plug into the crater, so as to make everything tight and snug, and one more nuisance is taken off the face of the earth. ”

“ We may refer the expression, “the sea and the waves roaring,” to unusual disturbances of the natural elements, and we have the most abundant evidences of its fulfillment in the storms and convulsions of nature that are occurring by sea and land, filling the heart with dread at the sight of every dark cloud that arises. The tidal waves and volcanic upheavals at sea have, in the last two or three decades, been marked with extraordinary violence. On land, cyclones and earthquakes have carried on a fearful work of destruction. ”

“ The natives opposite began hastily to sling ropes over the thatch of their light shanties, and one of the Englishmen who lived not far back of us had already stretched good solid cables over the steep-sloping roof of his domicile. A sort of hush prevailed, and then sudden gusts began to blow in off the bay. The scud-clouds increased and appeared to be in a fearful hurry. The roar of the surf loudened, and one after the other of our sliding sea-shell windows had to be shut and bolstered up for precaution. The typhoon seemed to be advancing slowly, as they often do, but its course was sure. ”