The Tsunamis

I haven't posted much about the earthquake & following tsunamis that pretty much levelled most of Sri Lanka and the coastal regions of at least 10 other countries on Boxing Day. I figure all you need to do is turn on the news and there it is.

The weird thing about this huge disaster is that I, newshound that I am, didn't even hear anything about it until sometime Monday afternoon. How I managed to hear nary a whisper about the fact that at least 40000 people may have died last Sunday is beyond me.

I recommend checking out the Wikipedia page about the earthquake & tsunamis. It's got an excellent breakdown of the geology behind the event, the damage and also a bit of history on other natural disasters along these lines. There's also an interesting blog by a couple who were honeymooning in the Maldives, which was hit. Gives a good first-hand account of the day.

I found that the most interesting piece of news today was that the sheer force of the earthquake actually caused the Earth to wobble slightly on Sunday and made the day shorter. Granted, in the grand scheme of things the wobble didn't have much effect, but yeesh. Not only that, but some of the Sumatran islands actually moved south about 40 meters!

Some of the video of the flooding is pretty hard to watch and that's coming from me. I was particularly struck by the video of a couple of elderly tourists inching their way across a fence at a hotel while the water was pushing down, only to be swept away when the fence actually gave way. That, and the video of the backhoes picking up piles of plastic wrapped corpses to dump into mass graves, and seeing some of the bodies just flop out before they get to the grave... Not right.