Tsunami Thailand 

The Tsunami in Thailand mostly hit Phuket, Khao Lak, some beach area on the islands around Phuket and Phi Phi plus north of Khao Lak.

Thailand's tsunami was such a immense disaster and costs thousands of life's that Thai people try to get rid of it by avoiding any possibility to talk about tsunami. This is a typical local way to try to get rid of a disaster by not talking about it. I asked several book chains in Thailand  why they don't have any books on Thailand and tsunami, almost with all of them it finally came out that there is a certain code of silence, means don't talk about it, it might disappear then automatically. Of course it wont but superstitious believes never fade away.

Phuket's tsunami was such an awful incident its difficult to put into words, just look at the pictures of Thailand tsunami. The pictures of the tsunami in Thailand below say more than thousand words.

Thailand at post tsunami opened up the struggle between the local people in Phuket, Phang Nga, Takuapa and Ranong province and so called "influential" people who tried immediately after the disaster to claim the coastal land belongs to them in the hope that the real owner died in the disaster and their predecessors cant show evidence to own this land since there are no deeds of lands in that area. This is going purely in the tradition, we stayed there, we own it. But this is possible to get rid of it by paying bribes at the right places. It is really unbelievable how the dark side of human surface after such disasters. 

Many Thailand resort near the beach were washed away by this tidal tsunami wave and the aftermath looked real grim. Since the tsunami happen every year are Thailand tsunami anniversary to commemorate the damage, the death toll

and the still missing from the disaster.

In our website you can find hundreds of Thailand tsunami photos of victims and survivors plus some tsunami recovery and relief. It is difficult to get reasonable tsunami statistics since even today at 2009 thousands of tsunami victims are not identifies, they still are kept in freezer containers north of Phuket airport.

But there is one real positive message, the tsunami aid from Thailand and all over the world was overwhelming and the tsunami damage in Thailand was all repaired within a year, this was a Hercules task considering the huge damages done.

How a vacation of intoxicating blend of sight, sound and scenes

turned into disaster via a Tsunami or - every paradise has its snakes.

This kind of “snake” was an over dimensioned anaconda of violent water, called Tsunami. After an exhaustive day, I was sleeping soundly, lost somewhere between the moon and Phuket.

Sometimes after dawn my sleep was interrupted because I felt the bed moving a bit, what was wrong, maybe to much wining and dining last night ? While trying to get my head clear I also noticed the water in the bottle on the night desk swapping back and forward.

Since I experienced quite a similar situation many years ago in a hotel in Istanbul, Turkey I was quite sure to experience an earthquake, but since the whole was over within seconds I just turned and kept on sleeping.

Some time later this morning a sound woke me up, like strong guts of wind and storm raging outside maybe a typhoon, tornado or what ?

The sound grew stronger and stronger, abruptly and immediately water seeped into the room, increasing its volume lightning fast until it engulfed the whole area. It was so fierce and forceful I couldn’t open the doors or windows, I was caught inside a hell of water.

The dirty brown water quickly filled up the room, only a small space near the ceiling was left so I got some air – sounds like Indiana Jones in real time-. Am I going to be buried in the water grave, were this my last moments?

Now a big bang, the door and windows broke open and the water disappeared leaving only some wet dirt behind, it looked like the big wave moved on and the pressure from outside disappeared. continuing below...

Tsunami Phuket Thailand 1	Tsunami Phuket Thailand 2
Tsunami Thailand, Phuket Thailand tsunami, Phuket tsunami, pictures of Thailand tsunami, pictures of the tsunami in Thailand, pictures of tsunami in Thailand, Khao Lak Thailand, Khao Lak Thailand tsunami, Khao Lak tsunami, aceh tsunami, after the tsunami in Thailand, aid Thailand, animals Thailand. Tsunami Phuket Thailand 3 Tsunami Phuket Thailand 4 Tsunami Phuket Thailand 5 Tsunami Phuket Thailand 6
Tsunami Khao Lak Thailand 16 Tsunami Khao Lak Thailand 17 Tsunami Khao Lak Thailand 18 Tsunami Khao Lak Thailand 19 Tsunami Khao Lak Thailand 20 Tsunami Khao Lak Thailand 21 Tsunami Khao Lak Thailand 22 Tsunami Khao Lak Thailand 23 Tsunami Phuket Thailand 16 Thank good or whoever, I was saved at last, I took a deep breath and tried to get body and soul together. I rushed out of the house just to stumble back, rack and ruin, the disaster and devastation was somehow unthinkable. Dead bodies with partly blue color were around, two guys came sliding down the palm- tree another one had embraced a palm tree and came through. Most of the people were gone, washed away to somewhere by the Tsunami. Tsunami Phuket Thailand 18
Tsunami Phuket Thailand 9 Tsunami Phuket Thailand 8 Tsunami Phuket Thailand 10 Cars and boats piled up forming a bizarre junk sculpture. People wading through the murky water, trying to find something, but in vain, all gone, sudden, quick and unexpected, a Tsunami is an uncontrollable natural disaster. Tsunami Phuket Thailand 11 Tsunami Phuket Thailand 12 Tsunami Phuket Thailand car on house Tsunami Phuket Thailand 13 Patong Tsunami Phuket Thailand 14 Patong Tsunami Phuket Thailand 15

Tsunami Phuket Thailand Mac Donald's	Tsunami Phuket Thailand Starbuck Coffee	Tsunami Phuket Thailand Speedboat in the House	Tsunami Phuket Thailand 19
Tsunami Phuket Thailand 23	Tsunami Phuket Thailand 22	Tsunami Phuket Thailand 21	Tsunami Phuket Thailand 20

Earthquakes involve abrupt sliding motions on faults as frictional resistance is overcome, with large volumes of strained rock releasing their accumulated elastic deformation. If located under the ocean, the rock motions can deform the ocean floor, pushing it up or pulling it down, thereby generating a wave that spreads out from the source just as a rock splashing into a pond will do. But, an earthquake somewhere between Sri Lanka and Thailand? The seismic activity in that region has not had many large events throughout my career, and it surprised me that any event large enough to cause a damaging tsunami spanning the Bay of Bengal would originate in this area. As I pondered this, CNN updates were reporting extensive damage on Phi Phi Island, where I had been snorkeling not long before - possibly a thousand deaths. Certainly this was a large tsunami, and the only region in the vicinity with a history of earthquakes large enough to generate such a damaging sea wave was somewhat to the south, along the island of Sumatra. A bad feeling began to grow in the pit of my stomach.

Great earthquakes, with seismic magnitudes from 8.5 to 9.0, had struck along the southern coast of central Sumatra in 1797, 1831, and 1861, and seismologists recognize the area as having the potential for huge earthquakes. But Phuket is shielded from any tsunami generated along central Sumatra by that island itself; only a rupture in northwestern Sumatra where there is no record of a prior great earthquake would expose Thailand to a tsunami. But the absence of a historical record of earthquakes can be misleading. The great 1964 Alaska earthquake, with a seismic magnitude of 9.2, struck a region that had not previously had such a huge event for more than a thousand years. During that long interval, plate-tectonic motions involving relative displacement of the Pacific and North American plates had built up elastic strain in the rocks that then released catastrophically, causing as much as ~20 m (~60 ft) of sudden sliding across a fault 200 km wide and 600 km long that dips down under the coastline. Massive destruction in Anchorage, located on the North American plate, occurred as the Pacific plate thrust under it toward the northwest. Tsunami waves inundated the Alaskan coast and spread throughout the Pacific, causing damage in California and even in Hawaii.

While no one had forecast such an event along northwestern Sumatra, the critical differences would that, unlike Alaska in 1964, Sumatra in 2004 has an extremely dense population living along the coastline, and the many population centers around the Bay of Bengal are much more vulnerable to a large tsunami in contrast to the wide-open Pacific Ocean south of Alaska. As my concern intensified, I went online to check the rapid earthquake information posted by the U.S. Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center (http://neic.usgs.gov/). Sure enough, a large earthquake had struck near Aceh province in northwestern Sumatra. An estimated magnitude of 8.5 was posted, and shortly thereafter a revised analysis by the Harvard seismology program gave a more robust estimate of 9.0. I knew then that the CNN damage reports must be falling far short of the true story; the absence of information from Indonesia was not a hopeful sign - it indicated a massive catastrophe.

POWER AND DESTRUCTION

For the next three months I was immersed in analyzing the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, working with many colleagues to quantify the nature of the earthquake faulting and the excitation and propagation of the tsunami that ensued. While some details still remain unresolved, the main characteristics of the event are now well understood, and numerous publications present the technical details, including a special section of the May 20, 2005, issue of Science, which I coordinated. The numbers that emerged are staggering, especially the human toll: 183,172 fatalities and 40,320 missing, of whom 167,000 are from Indonesia, 35,322 from Sri Lanka, 12,407 from India, and 8,212 from Thailand (http:// www.tsunamispecialenvoy.org/country/humantoll. asp). The tsunami caused more fatalities than any previously recorded tsunami, and only a couple of earthquakes in China have proved more deadly. The portion of the fault that ruptured is 1,300 km (780 mi) long, making it the longest rupture zone ever recorded. The width of the fault is about 250 km (150 mi) along Aceh province and 150 km (90 mi) along the Nicobar Islands and the Andaman Islands to the north. This fault is the contact surface between the Indian plate and the Andaman (or Burma) microplate, a sliver of the Eurasian Plate.

The earthquake resulted from northward motion of the Indian plate at about 45 millimeters per year (mm/yr) relative to Eurasia, with the Indian Ocean floor thrusting under Sumatra and the islands to the north. Patches along the fault surface experienced shearing slip of up to 15 m (45 ft), with the slip being larger in the southern half of the fault zone and tapering off toward the north. The seismic magnitude obtained from seismology and geodesy is 9.15, making this the largest earthquake in the world since 1964. The energy released is measured as 1.1 x 10^sup 18^ J, or about 260 megatons (~18,570 Hiroshima bombs). The slip area expanded with an average rupture velocity of 2.5 km/s (5,400 mi/hr), taking about 10 minutes to spread over the entire rupture zone. The event triggered a magnitude 8.6 aftershock on March 28, 2005, the second largest earthquake since 1964. Even for a seasoned seismologist familiar with the nature of large earthquakes, the numbers associated with this natural event are humbling.

CHARACTERIZING THE EARTHQUAKE

The seismological characterization of the 2004 event was done using hundreds of recordings of ground shaking at global seismic observatories. Sensitive pendulum-based instruments at these observatories detect and digitally record continuous ground motions as a function of time and direction of shaking. The sudden release of strain energy as frictional sliding occurred on the plate-boundary fault generated elastic waves that spread through the surrounding rocks, expanding throughout the interior and along the surface of the planet, eventually shaking the ground at every observatory. The seismic wave signals recorded for the 2004 earthquake were unprecedented; vast technological improvements in seismic recording have been made since 1964, and for the first time seismologists recorded the complete suite of vibrations generated by a magnitude 9+ earthquake. Again, seismologists are humbled by these recordings; the ground in Sri Lanka, about 1,600 km (960 mi) from the fault, moved up and down 9 cm (3.5 in) as the seismic waves passed, and every point on Earth's surface vibrated by at least 1 cm (0.4 in). Some standing patterns of Earth vibrations (normal modes) rang on detectably for several months until the March 28 aftershock motions overwhelmed them. Computer modeling of the recorded signals allowed seismologists to determine the geometry of the fault, the spatial distribution of slip on the fault, and the rate at which the rupture spread.

Geophysicists use many other data sources to characterize large earthquakes, and several totally new ones have been brought to bear on quantifying the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman event. Recordings of sound waves trapped in the oceanic SOFAR channel made by hydroacoustic arrays have been used to track the expansion of the rupture front in the first such application. Ground motions measured by GPS sensors reveal the static deformations caused by the event, along with additional slow deformations that took place during the several months after the event (with total slip on the fault from the slow motions being comparable to that released abruptly during the rapid sliding event). Satellite altimeter observations of sea-level captured the ocean-wave heights as the tsunami was spreading through the Bay of Bengal, allowing the first-ever detailed modeling of a tsunami wave field in deep water. Satellite images also revealed uplift and inundation of islands in the Nicobar and Andaman groups, some of which are otherwise inaccessible because of political factors. Without question, the 2004 event is now the best-characterized great earthquake that scientists have ever analyzed.

LESSONS LEARNED

The 2004 earthquake surprised seismologists by occurring in a region with no track record of great earthquakes and by rupturing such a great distance along a plate boundary that has increasingly oblique relative plate motion. While a smaller event localized to northwestern Sumatra would have been less surprising and could have been equally deadly for the local region, this area was not flagged as having potential for a magnitude 9.15 event by anyone. So lesson number one for seismologists is to not neglect the seismic hazard posed by tectonically active regions lacking prior earthquakes. The tsunami disaster was greatly enhanced by the rupture extending northward along the plate boundary to the Nicobar Islands and the Andaman Islands. This region is less evidently a tectonic hazard zone, as the relative plate motions suggest a strongly decreasing component of plate convergence toward the north, combined with increasing horizontal shearing mainly accommodated by less hazardous strike-slip faults in the Andaman Sea.

The second lesson for seismologists is that we must be concerned about induced slippage of weakly coupled regions adjacent to strongly coupled sections of plate boundaries. I believe that much of the fault zone along the Nicobar and Andaman Islands may have frictional properties known as conditional stability that allow it to normally fail aseismically in slow creep events, but to fail with rapid slip when loaded by the large changes in strain rates resulting from failure of the adjacent Aceh segment. There are several fault zones where areas of prior great earthquake activity abut fault sections that have no record of large events (eastern Sumatra and the Sunda trench is an example). The potential for moderate events to grow into great events by driving slip in areas of conditional frictional stability and the associated enhanced tsunami excitation needs to be considered.

OTHER POSSIBLE OCCURRENCES

The terrible destruction wrought by the 2004 tsunami

raises the question of where other such catastrophes may occur. For the United States, the answer is a grim one; an event comparable in size to the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake could strike along the coastline of Oregon and Washington. In this region, there is actually documentation of a prior great event that occurred in 1700, inundating the regional coastline and producing a tsunami as far away as Japan. A small remnant plate called the Juan de Fuca plate is under thrusting the west coast of the Pacific northwest, producing a subduction zone like that along Sumatra. The active volcanoes of the Cascadian Range indicate the ongoing tectonic activity of the region, and geodetic measurements show that the plate boundary fault is locked and accumulating strain.

Geophysicists are working to characterize the seismic potential of this region and to assess whether the fault is close to failure or hundreds of years away from failure. This undertaking is challenging and we have known about this potential hazard for only a decade, so it remains highly uncertain how immediate the threat may be. This uncertainty is true for other regions where there is recognized potential for great earthquakes (for example, near central Sumatra and near southern Peru/northern Chile), so there is also research on rapid tsunami warning systems.

WARNING SYSTEMS

The idea underlying tsunami warning systems is to use technology to detect and to characterize earthquakes as they happen, exploiting the time delay due to water-wave propagation from the region of ocean-bottom deformation to give warning to coastal communities. This problem is more manageable for regions far from the source than for regions close to it. A tsunami in the deep ocean travels about 900 km/hr (540 mi/hr), roughly the speed of a passenger jet. It took about two hours for the tsunami wave to travel to Sri Lanka and to Phuket. Seismic waves travel much faster, with P waves traversing the entire planet in about twenty minutes. Rapid processing of seismic signals that are telemetric from global seismic observatories to an analysis center can enable scientists to characterize the faulting on time scales of fifteen to sixty minutes - fast enough to warn remote areas that a tsunami may be on the way. Telemetered signals from ocean-bottom pressure sensors can confirm the presence and strength of tsunami signals in the ocean. Such combined seismic and ocean-pressure data analysis are the keystones of the Pacific Tsunami Warning System operated by NOAA to give warnings about tsunamis in the Pacific basin. Unfortunately, no system was in place for the Indian Ocean in 2004, and it is only in the wake of the disaster than an international effort is underway to establish a tsunami-warning system there.

The challenge of a tsunami warning a nearby coastline of an incipient tsunami is much more daunting; one cannot wait for seismic waves to travel to distant stations. Strategies such as rapid local analysis of regional seismic waves, use of differential GPS measurements to detect sudden crustal motions, and shallow-water tide gauges and water pressure meters, all with continuous telemetry and real-time analysis, are critical technological approaches to nearby tsunami-warning systems. But research on and development of such a system are receiving relatively little investment, even for countries with recognized earthquake/tsunami hazard such as the United States. Of course, any technological approach must be balanced by a societal response capacity to receive the scientific warning, to warn the public, to evacuate, and other activities. One of the major hurdles confronting development of such systems is the low probability of such events; it is very challenging to sustain technological warning systems and societal awareness and preparation for long periods. Perhaps the magnitude of the 2004 Sumatra tsunami disaster will suffice to sustain commitment to implementing global tsunami-warning capabilities that will mitigate future catastrophes. I fear that the lessons learned may too soon be forgotten - until the next disaster. Author Thorne Lay, PhD, is professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Copyright National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved