ENGLISH PROJECT

BY: S.ARCHANA PRASAD VIII_C

TSUNAMI

HERE ARE SOME PICS OF TSUNAMI

TSUNAMI Somewhere along the vast ocean floor, a colossal plate of oceanic crust strains to dip under another. It hits a snag, and the pressure builds. Then, with a tremendous jolt, the plates slip. The force quakes Earth and jostles the ocean water above it. A tsunami is born. Tsunamis are violent ocean waves that may be truly gigantic. They can travel through the ocean with the speed of a jetliner, then rise to heights of 30 feet (9 meters) or more before crashing onto shore and rushing far inland. The awesome power of tsunamis can have deadly consequences. In the past century, tsunamis have killed more than 50,000 people. In 1992 and 1993 alone, major tsunamis hit Nicaragua, Indonesia, and Japanwith a combined death toll of 2,000. On July 17, 1998, an earthquake off the coast of Papua New Guinea triggered three devastating tsunamis, each about 30 to 40 feet (9 to 12 meters) high. The massive waves annihilated several of the island's villages and killed about 2,200 people; thousands more were injured. Be it an undersea earthquake, landslide, or volcanic eruption, the event that triggers a tsunami typically lasts a few seconds or, at most, a minute or two. Yet the tsunamis that result can continue to pound nearby shores for hours, and

distant shores for days. Indeed, a tsunami is rarely a one-hit phenomenon

What is a Tsunami?

Tsunamis are popularly known as "tidal waves," even though they have nothing to do with tides. Somewhat more accurate is the translation of the Japanese term tsunami: "harbor wave." The name refers to the way that these waves can fill and overwhelm an entire harbor, as they have many times in Japan's history. Indeed, the islands of Japan have been hit by more tsunamis than any other country.
Many scientists use the term seismic wave to describe tsunamis, since these waves are often created by seismic, or earthquake, activity along the ocean floor. Tsunamis can also arise through a sudden and massive undersea movement, such as a landslide or volcanic eruption. Tsunamis can occur in any ocean. However, they are most likely to arise in the Pacific Ocean's so-called "Ring of Fire." This "ring," circling much of the Pacific, marks an area of great instability in Earth's crust.

Just as a single rock thrown into a lake creates many ripples spreading out from the impact, the force that spawns tsunamis sends out a series of underwater shock waves. But this force is not a single point, like the rock. The fault line on which an earthquake is centered can extend for hundreds of miles. In a tsunami-forming earthquake, the ground on one side of a fault line suddenly lifts or sinks. All of the water above it also rises or falls, forming a high point (called a wave crest) or low point (a wave trough) in the water. In this way, each shudder or jolt of the earthquake sends out another tsunami front. In the very deep water of the open ocean, tsunamis travel quickly and spread out from one another. The spacing within a series of seismic waves can be as much as 100 miles (160 kilometers). A newborn tsunami traveling in open water is virtually invisible. The surface of the ocean generally rises and falls only a few inchesor at most a few feetbetween the wave's crest and trough. As a consequence, tsunamis cannot be reliably spotted by airplane. Even observers in a ship would hardly feel the wave's passage beneath them because the bulk of a tsunami lies beneath the surface. The rise and fall of its wave reaches all the way down to the seafloor.

Importantly, tsunamis do not die out after traveling a short distance (as a windblown surface wave might). The seismic wave's energy is greatest at its source and diminishes as it travels. But that initial burst of energy is often so great that even a so-called "diminished" seismic wave can do a great deal of damage. Consider, for instance, a 1960 earthquake off the coast of Chile, registering 8.9 on the Richter scale. It created tsunamis that reached heights of up to 35 feet (10.7 meters) along much of the Chilean coast. The waves also headed eastward across the open ocean. Fifteen hours later, they hit Hilo, Hawaii, killing 61 people and injuring 282. Eight hours after that, this same series of waves reached Hokkaido and Honshu, Japan. At that point, they reached "just" 12 to 20 feet (3.7 to 6 meters) in heightenough to kill more than 180 people, leave 500,000 more homeless, and cause more than $400 million in property damage. Indeed, the energy of this set of tsunamis was so great that measurable waves continued to reverberate back and forth across the Pacific for longer than a week.

Tsunami Safety

The power of a tsunami is the stuff of legend. Some people believe that a tsunami wiped out the mythical city of Atlantis. Another theory holds that it was the initial harbor-emptying phase of a tsunami that was the real force behind Moses' parting of the Red Sea. It has even been suggested that giant tsunamisspawned from a gigantic asteroid impacthelped to kill off the world's dinosaurs.
Despite modern technology, humans are not much better off than the dinosaurs when it comes to avoiding tsunamis. The only thing people can do is get out of their way, and fast! Many coastal communitiesespecially those along the Ring of Fire have developed tsunami evacuation plans. Their aim is to shepherd people off beaches and low-lying coastal areas and onto higher ground. Crucial to any such plan is an early-warning system. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center was built in 1948. It collects seismic data from 26 member countries and a number of other nonmember participants via satellite, and keeps watch 24 hours a day for any suspicious shaking that might trigger tsunamis. A second warning center, in Palmer, Alaska, studies local seismic activity that could trigger tsunamis heading toward the coasts of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. When seismometers detect a quake of magnitude 7.5 or greater near or under the ocean, the warning centers send out an initial alert to all local authorities within three hours of tsunami travel time

THANKS FOR WATCHING

GOOD DAY MAM PRESENTED BY: S. ARCHANA PRASAD CLASS VIII-C