Talk:2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami/Archive 5

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A Question -Statistical Data Wanted

I gues this is not the right way but after yesterdays quake I have already seen people mentioning the wrath of god because the first quake was 1 day after christmas and the second big one one day after easter. What are the chances of such events happening on these days? (and off course also the quake on boxing day 2003 in Bam Iran) Thanks82.168.57.168 17:00, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Plague

See [1]. How much can be predicted about the scale of the coming plague, and what is the time frame for epidemics of particular diseases? ‣ᓛᖁᑐ 16:14, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The media loves scare-mongering. I wouldn't worry just yet. However, I only say that because the immense world-wide aid response has likely headed off this very real threat. Dan100 23:11, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)

There are already reports of a Cholera outbreak in Sri Lanka, wich is a serious disease and could couse a lot of (thousands?) deaths. My only source as of yet is a Dutch link (also, written in dutch) [2]. But I'm sure there are more sources about this. If there are no sources to be found, I'm sure someone from Holland would be so kind to translate it :).

It says 120 people in a Sri Lankan refugee camp have cholera and World Vision expects 1500 cases. See the World Vision site for the story in English. -- Zosodada

There are a number of sites reporting the first diarrheal diseases in Sri Lanka, like this one. The regions that have infrastructure and a decent health care system seek to have done a lot, but the crowded displaced camps in Sri Lanka are a major concern as the sanitation facilities are inadequate. And nobody has the slightest clue what is happening, disease-wise, in rural Sumatra. BanyanTree 01:20, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Plague is a particular disease set linked to rodent > human transmission and shouldn't be confused with pandemic. -- Zosodada

Yes, I know, but that's the pedantic interpretation. Pandemic doesn't carry nearly the sense of disaster that plague does. ‣ᓛᖁ

ᑐ 02:50, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

But the point of Wikipedia is to provide accurate information, and plague and pandemic are different. And pandemic sounds just as threatening to me as plague does. bob rulz 03:40, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)

Are you suggesting this article could be more sensational? -- Zosodada

I thought encyclopedias were supposed to be pendantic, and choose language that is accurate rather than that which conveys "a sense of disaster". BanyanTree 04:10, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Well, yes. I'm not an encyclopedia, though, and pandemic just doesn't feel as disasterish to me. The article should of course refer to epidemics and pandemics when they occur. ‣ᓛᖁ

ᑐ 05:16, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Ah, I hadn't realized the discussion was only about the Talk page. I'll back away slowly now. BanyanTree 05:24, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Since we're being pedantic here, pandemic isn't the right term either. If there were a rapidly growing cholera outbreak among the survivors (which fortunately has not happened yet), it would be termed an epidemic. A pandemic is most unlikely. - Jpo 18:23, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)

The CDC has issued a Tsunami notice for travelers detailing the fun and exciting diseases available to travelers in tsunami-affected areas. -- Cyrius|✎ 06:07, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

An anon intending to be helpful replaced the above link to an obsolete article with a link to the more current Interim Guidance for Travelers to Areas Affected by the Tsunami. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:50, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Information removed that was added by User:201.254.22.99

It is "Diego Leandro Moscato is my friend, please contact him, he lives in ituzaingo". I guess this may be a potential victim, so I'm putting it on the talk page. - Ta bu shi da yu 10:58, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Seismic detection

I wonder if a mention of the quakes detection should be mentioned, I live in Flagstaff Arizona, in the USA. I saw on the news a day or two after the quake that the quake itself was actually detected by at least one of the seismic monitoring stations in the area. While this may be unusual, we have a large volcanic field here and studying it is done all the time, it still demonstrates the scale of the quake to be measured something like 12,000 miles away. -JetJon 16:36, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)

It's common for seismic waves from any earthquake to be picked up far away, even on the other side of the world. Interestingly, it's from the study of these waves that we've learnt about the nature of the interior of our planet. The difference in time it takes for the waves to reach different seismic stations is also used to triangulate the exact location of the quake. Dan100 17:03, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. I didn’t know it was that common for it to travel so far. However I can see how it would do so, anyone know the speed of sound in liquid rock (silicon, iron, misc. other elements)? That would be an interesting piece of info. How long it took the quake to be measured around the world. -JetJon 01:00, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

The exact speed varies with the density of the particular patch of "whatever" the wave is passing through, but sources say this runs somewhere in the 30,000 km/h (18,000 mph) range. -- Cyrius|✎ 06:33, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Earthquakes produce two types of waves - Primary (P) and Secondary (S). One is longitudinal and the other transverse but I can never remember which is which. P-waves do about 8-13.5 km/s while S-waves do 7-8 km/s. As said, the speed varies depending on the density of what they're travelling through. Scientists use all this data to work out what's down there... Dan100 13:35, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

- An earthquake larger than about 6.5 can be detected almost any where in the world with modern seismic instruments and a location that has little ground noise. P waves come first and are pressure waves or longitudnal, just like a sound wave.. S waves are a transverse or shear wave.

Using the Iris Seismic monitor I saw that the farthest the earthquake was detected was 18260 km away at station JTS - Las Juntas de Abangares, Costa Rica a station operated by the Global Seismograph Network (GSN - IRIS/IDA) the P wave arrived at 01:19:32 or about 21 minutes after the earthquake.

Interesting information, thank you all for showing me. I guess there really is no need to put that in the article, but there should be, if there is not already, a link to an article about earthquakes in general that would explain this and other things.-JetJon 21:21, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

Actually there are four types of waves all generated simultaneously. They arrive in following order: first the body waves P waves then S waves, next the surface waves Love waves then Rayleigh waves. See http://wapi.isu.edu/envgeo/EG5_earthqks/eg_mod5.htm. Also see excellent Wikipedia article on Seismic wave.

External link overload?

It seems to me that many of the external links provided are redundant or unnecessary. For example, most of the pages linked under "Background information" contain information that readers ideally should be able to find at the article on tsunamis, and having three directory links really seems like overkill. Most of the blogs linked contain virtually the same information, so including so many doesn't seem particularly helpful to readers trying to locate concise, useful information. There is one blog that apparently contains all videos of the disaster[3], yet we have over a dozen individual videos linked after that. Many of the ongoing news collections contain the same exact information, so perhaps we should select a few that contain the best reporting and link only those. Individual articles might be better off linked within the article as sources.

These are just some examples of what I believe is overload, and ways to improve the problem. I'm uncomfortable making any such edits myself, however, because I'm relatively new to this article and I don't know if this is the preferred method of displaying information in times of crisis. Does anyone else agree that maybe we should try to organize the external links more efficiently? How would you go about doing it? Beginning 22:57, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)

The best links are being lost by enormity of the section - it should be cut down. violet/riga (t) 23:07, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Some of the links are country-specific and can be moved to the new country pages. Do you think we should just delete the individual news articles? They all seem to be covered by the news sites collecting numberous articles, and some of the articles are very outdated at this point. BanyanTree 23:41, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I think adding some of the better ones into the article itself as sources isn't a bad idea, but most definitely can come out. They just restate the same info over and over again, and it's too much. Maybe people who made edits can put the sources they found most useful into the appropriate places within the article? Beginning 01:42, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

I've taken a bold move in regards to the lists of external links. The number of external links should be reduced more, but this is a start. Wikipedia is not a weblink index or a news service. I also removed external links to Background info. Let's try to point users to other parts of wikipedia instead of sending them away from this site. Kingturtle 01:50, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

And I've moved links to country impact pages, humanitarian response page, earthquake and tsunami. With [[Kingturtle's edits and the creation of the country pages, the scroll "dot" on the right side of my screen has become an oval for the first time in days. :) BanyanTree 02:06, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I would like to reduce the ongoing news collections links down to no more than one per country unless absolutely necessary, and even that might be more than necessary. I'm going to go with CNN for the U.S., the BBC for the U.K., ABC News for Australia, and Hindustan Times for India, as those seem to have the most comphrensive reporting from each country. Much of the information is still the same, but it's progress. I will probably start condensing blogs next; feel free to comment or revert as you see necessary. Thanks to each of you for your work so far! Beginning 02:22, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

It's true that we're not the world center for tsunami videos, but I think it's well within Wikipedia's mission to provide a convenient listing of the most important or definitive videos. I'm adding back the link to the debris-flow video from Metro TV in Indonesia. I think this one makes particularly clear why the tsunami caused so much death--a question that I and friends wondered about when we heard that a mere ocean wave had killed 100,000+ people. I think answering this sort of "why" question is what an encyclopedia is all about, and one of the best uses of video links from Wikipedia. If you can find a better link to that video (you probably can), please don't hesitate to replace it, of course. --Ben Kovitz 02:40, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Many of the links that people are posting are to rather disorganized sites, like blogs. Let's limit our video links to those that go either directly to videos or to extremely rich and/or organized web sites of videos. But please don't delete the good links. They're precious and hard to find, which is why our Wikipedia page is so useful. --Ben Kovitz 05:38, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Aceh

I moved Indonesia over India because Indonesia was hit harder than India.

Foreigners were completely banned from Aceh prior to the quake/tsunami. The Indonesian government has been blocking access to Aceh after the quake as well, although I've heard they're being ever so slightly more flexible under enormous pressure since then. It's certainly possible (hopefully) that they will announce in the coming days/weeks that they will be allowing international humanitarian aid organizations into Aceh. They have not done so yet, thus the handful of foreigners allowed in so far have been exceptions to the rule, not a policy change. Ruy Lopez 07:05, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I don't quite understand the logic of moving only one country to numerical order, while leaving the rest in alphabetical order. Mixing the rank orders is just confusing. Anyone else have thoughts on this?

Ruy Lopez, if you have a reference, please put your info into the Indonesia page. BanyanTree 07:17, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The line "Aceh was under martial law for all of 2004, with all foreigners banned from travelling there, and the Indonesian government has been under pressure by world government's to allow international humanitarian aid workers into Aceh" under Impact on Indonesia is mostly covered under the relevant country impact page and unnecessarily lengthens a section that reports only the most direct effects of the earthquake and tsunamis. BanyanTree 19:46, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Interwiki links

What is the rationale in removing all of the interwiki links? Waerth 10:38, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

What motivates vandals has always been a mystery to me. You didn't think it was an intentional decision by a real contributor, did you? -- Cyrius|✎

Nope was just to lazy to look up what happened after I didn't see it in the last 2 or 3 changes. Sorry if I went overboard. Waerth 14:59, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Two sections need merging

I think 'Failure to detect the tsunamis' and 'Early warning systems' really need rolling into one.Dan100 13:50, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

Done. Dan100 17:44, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

-- I think there should be more time looking at the communications breakdown. Several people knew in advanced that there was going to be a tsunami but there was no system for alerting people or way to get the message out.

Early warning etc

Just to explain, there were large parts of this article that were better covered at tsunami and tsunami warning systems. Where needed, I've cut the text down and introduced links to those pages. The article is already excessively long as it is. Dan100 22:06, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

One phrase in this section might be misleading as it is being used to illustrate the rarity of tsunamis in the Indian Ocean "the last major one there was caused by the Krakatoa eruption of 1883." There are several sources that mention tsunamis triggered in the last century in the Indian Ocean, some maybe as relevant as the Krakatoa one. This site [4] says "There have been 7 records of Tsunamis set off by Earthquakes near Indonesia, Pakistan and one at Bay of Bengal in the last century." This is still much rarer than the Pacific, but from a brief look through, it seems that the 1945 Pakistan event and 1941 Bay of Bengal event are at least deserving of mention. - An Interested Reader - 01:30, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)

PTWC established in 1949

Please would people note that the PTWC was established in 1949, not 1965 as some people are insisting. The systems established as a result of the 1965 quake was the regional-level Alaska/Hawaii system. Dan100 22:05, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

If you google the words

1965 tsunami warning

there are multiple sources that say that it was the international warning system that was put into place in 1965. Yes the PTWC was founded in 1949, but what is in the article is referring to the 1965 international warning system. -- Curps 22:17, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Never mind google, read about it from the people who built and operate the systems:

1949 system - protects all Pacific and Haiwaii except Alaska and US West coasst

1967 system - established after the '64 Alskan quake to specifically protect Alaska and US West coast.

Dan100 22:21, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

But what year did other nations join in (Japan for instance)? It couldn't have been 1949, Japan was not yet sovereign again after WWII. Anyways, that's just a side issue. It makes sense to cover the details in the "warning systems" article and just mention that warning systems have been in place for a long time in the Pacific. -- Curps 22:39, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Low wave height and warnings

Regarding duplication, the latest version I edited is considerably reduced from what I wrote originally. As it stands, I don't think there's any significant duplication. Perhaps the earlier version did have some.

I think it's important to have at least a single sentence pointing out that tsunamis have low height in open ocean, otherwise people seeing the computer model tsunami animations might think that giant "Poseidon Adventure"-type tsunamis swept over the ocean and should have been easy to spot by airplanes or other observers, and thus mistakenly wonder why there wasn't more warning. So that one sentence doesn't really constitute significant duplication. There has to be minimal material for people to get a good grasp even if they don't click to the "tsunami" and "monitoring and warning system" pages. -- Curps 22:39, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The text below the computer animation already states that. I don't think we need to assume people are so daft they need telling twice. Even if it was needed, tsunami characteristics or similar would be a better place. Dan100 22:48, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

I've just put in the part which describes how the tsunami was created as it probably should be there. Dan100 22:52, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

I don't agree with putting the part about low-height where you moved it. The "signs and warnings" section mentions that victims got no warning, due to no tsunami warning system in place to detect and warn. Low height is closely related to this, precisely because it's the cause of difficulty of detection. So it all fits logically in place here.

Your version may have been a bit too long (mentioning Thai meteorologists twice, etc). -- Curps 23:18, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The low height of the deep-ocean wave isn't a factor in failure the failure to warn people at all (even if it seems to be one at first glance). Either a country or area have the ability to detect tsunamis (via bottom pressure recorders, tide guages etc) and the means to warn the threatened populace at extremely short notice, or they don't. Even if the wave had been 15m high in the deep ocean and every ship had spotted it there'd have been no difference in the outcome - the countries around the Indian Ocean have no systems or procedures for warning and mass-evacuation. Dan100 16:33, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)

Article name

Should this article be one article, or two, one on the Earthquake, one on the subsequent tsunamis? If it is to be one article, the majority of the article is about the damage caused by the resultant tsunamis, and not on what was directly wrought by the earthquake, so the article should be named: Boxing Day 2004 Indian Ocean tsunamis. 132.205.15.43 01:37, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The article's name has been previously discussed. The short of it is that there's a bunch of potential names, none of which is an obviously wonderful choice. For example, your suggestion includes the unnecessary "Boxing Day". That would just confuse Americans, and of the rest of the world, few are going to look for it under that name.

The BBC calls it the Boxing Day Tsunami, or Asian Tsunami.132.205.45.148 22:52, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The term "Boxing Day" is used and understood in many English-speaking countries including Canada, but not in the United States. And that's a large segment of the English-language Wikipedia audience. -- Curps 01:48, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Any page moves can wait. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, we can take our time on matters of style. -- Cyrius|✎ 07:45, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Boxing Day? How many notable Indian Ocean tsunamis occured in 2004? ADH (t&m) 07:50, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)

Every news organization seems to call it the TSUNAMI disaster, not the Earthquake disaster, so at the very least, it should be called Tsunami(s) and not Earthquake, as this would probably be the search for people now and in the future. 132.205.45.110 19:35, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The primary cause was the earthquake, which itself did massive damage to the area around it. That's like having an article on "The Haitian mudslides of 2004" instead of Hurricane Jeanne. However, I might be okay with "2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami". --Golbez 20:25, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)

"Asian Tsunami" should be used to term the devastation that occurred on the 26th Dec 2004. The term "Asian Tsunami" differentiates other tsunamis and will undoubtedly be a easier term to use when describing the event. Yahoo has 41 hits on "AsianTsunami" and 846,000 hits for "Asian Tsunami" while Goggles has 139 hits for "AsianTsunami" and 3,260,000 for "Asian Tsunami" ... need I say more ;-). Have the year attached behind i.e. "Asian Tsunami 2004" to specifically state it as a 2004 event.User:Ken, Singapore

Unfortunately, "Ken, Singapore" is spamming every page with links to http://www.asiantsunami.org/ so he is hardly impartial:

203.120.68.68 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)

This article was originally created and named (by me, actually) eight hours after the quake. Keith Edkins independently created 2004 Sumatra Earthquake only six minutes later, but he redirected it to my article eight minutes after that.

At that time, the known death toll was in the hundreds and expected to reach the thousands. This was comparable to the Great Chilean Earthquake of 1960 in terms of casualties from earthquake + tsunami, and it was the biggest earthquake on Earth in 40 years, so at the time the earthquake was the story. I had almost picked a name involving Sumatra or Indonesia, but even then there were reports about Phuket and other places being hit, so I wanted to broaden the scope.

We should probably wait to see if the world settles on a common name for this event and change it then, because there are a lot of links to rename. If the new name includes "tsunami", I would prefer "Indian Ocean tsunami disaster" rather than "Asian tsunami disaster" being it's more unique -- the last major tsunami in the Indian Ocean was from Krakatoa in 1883, while there are lots of tsunamis in the Pacific, and one of them could yet cause an Asian disaster if it occurs close to shore and there is no time for residents to evacuate despite tsunami warning systems in place. And also obviously, "Indian Ocean" is more inclusive than "Asian", since there was loss of life in Africa too.

-- Curps 01:42, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Vandalism

The Sri Lanka casualty figures are, obvoiusly, inaccurate. Someone should change them. Comrade Tassadar 02:37, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Current SL figures include both government and Tiger stats. Mark ¹ 04:33, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This is irrelevant now - someone vandalised it to say something else, not even numbers. Comrade Tassadar 02:37, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Here are some of your vandals:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2994204

power of earthquake

I was quite some time amazed by the numbers of tghe power, untill I found it so unlikely I started to do a bit of research on the internet for my own. As stated by the USGS the energy was 20X10^17 Joules, and not 2.5X10^20 which is a difference of a factor 125. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqinthenews/2004/usslav/neic_slav_faq.html The energy in TNT seems to be a wrong calculation too. One kilo TNT is 4,184X10^9 joule. This would lead to 60,000 megatons of TNT, not to 32,000. I do not have time to check all other calculations, so I am afraid I will have to delete them because they seem to be to unreliable. I do think it is interesting to have them, so if anybody feels like searching and calculating please feel submit the right energy values expressed in:

litres of boiled water for every huiman being on earth
world (or US) yearly energy consumption
the energy of a major natural disaster like Hurricane Isabel

The calculations for the relevant article content were derived from a discussion now in the fourth archive found here. Somebody who actually understands what a joule is should probably do another check. BanyanTree 22:50, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Assuming the USGS figure is correct (2 X 10^18 Joules) that gives an energy equivalent to roughly 500 Megatons (1 MT = 4.18 X 10^15 J). Which is 10 times bigger than the largest thermonuclear bomb ever detonated (Soviet test Oct 1961). Big, but certainly not 32,000 MT.

Also E=MC^2 gives a mass equivalent of 23 grams which is a mere 0.8 oz.

The problem is the USGS sources contradicted each other. We originally relied on [5], which had a section on "How much energy is released in an earthquake?", and a table that very clearly stated that a magnitude 9.0 earthquake released 32,000 megatons of energy. If you go to http://earthquake.usgs.gov/faq/ , you will see this question is still in the table of contents, but has now been entirely removed from the FAQ itself!

Meanwhile, a new FAQ specific to this earthquake [6] gives a drastically smaller figure of 475 megatons.

We can only assume that the new figure must be more accurate. The fault for the mixup lies entirely with the original USGS source, unfortunately.

If the new figure is not revised again, we can redo the "how many liters of water boiled per person on earth" calculation, as per the calculations here. -- Curps 23:09, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

More vandalism

There's been a whole lot of stuff deleted and sundry silly changes - trouble is, the Wiki isn't working well at the moment, so I can't find what's missing easily for restoration. It needs a fairly major check-over, which should I think be done by a moderator with a temporary hold on all other edits until it is done - MPF 16:02, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

clarification please

"Official count stopped due to extreme chaos in affected areas."

please define chaos, and please define EXTREME chaos. does this meet looting? human violence? fighting? gun fire? what exactly. Kingturtle 22:08, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Probably some of that, and also just complete utter destruction of infrastructure and access routes to some areas. Only helicopter flyovers, satellite pictures and landings from naval ships possible in some areas, even now.

What happened?

I may be missing something, but somebody blanked the page.

Never mind, thanks Shmuel. Dralwik 01:52, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It is more concise now with appropriate links to drill down further. Only that I really miss the the summary table of casualties because it gives a bird view of the impact the tsunami to each affected countries/nations.

Tsunamis with low height?

Note: Tsunamis have very low height while travelling over deep ocean, and ocean-going vessels in their path do not usually notice them. High waves only occur when shallow water is reached.

How can anybody not see how that is a load of crap? The earthquake is on the bottom of the ocean while there is a slight effect on the top of the ocean. The tsunami is really moving through the entire height of the water. The reason it seems to have a "very low height" is because the water is so deep. Subsequently added signature: Brian j d 09:02, 2005 Jan 27 (UTC)

For a load of crap, it sure has a large intersection with the truth. The height in question is the amplitude of the wave, not the depth of water being moved. A tsunami in deep water has very high speed and very little amplitude. Even though it's moving the whole column of water, it's not moving it very much. -- Cyrius|✎ 08:15, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I always thought, and this seems consistent with Wiktionary:Height, that "height" is a measurement in a vertical direction. I don't think I've ever heard of the amplitude of a wave being referred to as "height". Brianjd 07:31, 2005 Jan 11 (UTC)

The amplitude of a tsunami is in the vertical direction. Wave height is actually twice the amplitude, but that's a relatively minor quibble compared to everything else.

"In oceanography, wave height (fig. l-31) is the vertical distance, usually measured in feet, from the crest of a wave (the highest portion of a wave) to the trough of the wave (the lowest portion of the wave)." [7]

I know. I dunno why I wrote that garbage. Brian j d 09:02, 2005 Jan 27 (UTC)

Including the depth of the ocean the wave occurs in as part of the height isn't terribly useful. As a tsunami has an amplitude of only a few feet, ocean bottom variations would make this number completely meaningless. -- Cyrius|✎ 08:04, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Has anyone seen data on the period of the waves? In some pictures it looks like the wave came in and went back out rather quickly, and in others it looked like it had come in like a river for a very long time. This would be good information in the Characteristics of the Tsunami section if anyone has good data. Obviously it could be different from place to place.

I have a related question. In the tsunami animations it appears that the wave reflected off Sri Lanka and India back towards the Andamans, Myanmar and Thailand. Were these secondary tsunamis felt at all? --Brhaspati 21:06, 2005 Jan 5 (UTC)

While sources say tsunamis do reflect off landforms, I can't find anything about whether or not this particular tsunami was measurable at the other end. -- Cyrius|✎ 08:04, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I remember hearing that it was detected off England's coast - wouldn't it have to be reflected to get there? Brian j d 09:02, 2005 Jan 27 (UTC)

Image:Tsunami-worldpropagation2004b.jpg illustrates how ripples traveled around the world (there are links to animations, if your internet connection is high speed). -- Curps 09:38, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Risk of further quakes or volcanoes

As i understand it, the Australasian plate has been pushed down by the European plate. Hasnt this effectively shifted the stress and pressure to say the Lake Toba area, making the risk of eurption highly likely ?

Any scientists looking into this, and able to give comments ?

I can't find any report from vulcanologists of an increase in activity in Indonesia. -- Cyrius|✎ 18:05, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'm not a scientist or vulcanologist, but there appears to be reports of unusual temperature increase in the area. Satellite imagery also shows smoke. And isnt a quake near a volcano pretty much an indication that its about to blow ?

The whole area is subject to major seismic and volcano activity. I wouldn't take an earthquake to be a sign of imminent volcanic activity unless it was actually under the volcano. It's highly unlikely that any volcano could raise atmospheric temperatures over a wide area without being spotted. "Unusual" temperature rises happen all the time as a normal part of Earth's atmospheric processes. -- Cyrius|✎ 08:10, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There now seems to be expert opinions from the academic world lending weight to the idea that there is indeed increased risk. And the occurence of the 7th largest eartquake in March 2005 just underlines this risk. Most scary is the warning that there is now an increae risk of the Toba supervolcano going off. Does someone want to insert a short line in the article somewhere about this increased risk ? [ http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12716344-2,00.html]

Mt Tlang has now erupted. How long before Toba goes off ? Is someone looking into this ? [ http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12831683-2,00.html]

Frightened villagers have started a chain SMS message asking for the sacrifice of goats[8]

Removal of country-specific details

I believe it was Cantus that removed the country specific info into Countries affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. While I can see the reason behind this I can't help but think that such information was better incorporated in this article. It is now quite difficult to get to the "Impact on..." articles as people now have to go through the "Countries affected..." article to get to them. Should it be re-incorporated or should another way of linking these articles be arranged? violet/riga (t) 18:50, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I've also been unsure about the wisdom of the move. One way to short-circuit the two-level drill currently required is to make the list of countries in the relevant section of this article links to the "Impact on" articles rather than to the country articles. Thoughts? BanyanTree 19:08, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This might be good in the table rather than within the article (with explainatory text). Zosodada 20:54, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I assume you mean the casualty figure table? With a note at the bottom telling readers to click a nation name for more country-specific info? [Yes.-Z.] That's not entirely intuitive but probably as good as my idea. All this talk of tables has made me start wondering if the articles are stable enough for one of those neat boilerplate navigation sidebars, which would make finding "Impact on Somalia", for example, a lot easier. 23:10, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

OK, I just replaced the table links and added a short note. It certainly can't hurt. Do people think more needs to be done? BanyanTree 04:50, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Tilly Smith

This Tilly Smith story has a primary source that is fairly dubious. The UK "Sun". . . also, no mention of "bobbing boats" in cited article. I can't edit the page at the moment, something to do with my IP. Zosodada 01:23, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The story has been fairly widely reported, and the name of the teacher (Andrew Kearney) has been reported too. Try http://news.google.com/ It seems genuine. Don't know about bobbing boats, maybe that could be removed. -- Curps 03:32, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Here's a source (UK Telegraph) complete with bobbing boats. But I edited that detail out anyway for space. [9] -- Curps 03:35, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Okay, but the Sun is the primary source for all articles on this; i counted 7, all crediting the Sun. This Telegraph does cite "bobbing" for sure -- verbatium. Thanks for helping to fix it. -- 152.163.101.10 05:16, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The Sun was first to report it, but other credible sources have presumably verified before publishing. I would be very surprised if the TV news in the UK haven't already interviewed Smith, Kearney and beach bystanders many times over by now, they always vigorously pursue human interest stories like this. There is plenty of detail available: the school was Danes Hill Prep School, Leatherhead Road, Oxshott [10] If it was a hoax it would surely have been exposed by now. As far as I know, the Sun has a reputation for sensationalistic tabloid reporting, but not for hoaxes. -- Curps 20:02, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

From the Archive

Re: 400,000 dead in Indonesia

Is there any other confirmation of Indonesian authorities speaking of 400,000 ... dead than [6] (http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v3/news_lite.php?id=111574)? This number seems incredibly high. --EBB 21:54, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Google "Rusdihardjo" at Google News (http://news.google.com/). Malaysia Star is also reporting it. -- Curps 22:05, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. Couldn't (Can't) just believe it. --EBB 22:11, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Other news media are so far not reporting on this 400,000 figure. Although any comment by Indonesis's ambassador to Malaysia is in itself newsworthy, this may have simply been a case of a government official with presumably no scientific or disaster expertise wildly speculating out loud. At least we can hope so. -- Curps 09:26, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

... All accounts seem to come from the same source (a comment made by Indonesia's ambassador to Malaysia). I feel that this figure does not deserve placement in the lead paragraph of the article, where it currently resides, unless it is confirmed by something more substantial than a single comment of one individual. - Jpo 19:29, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. -- Curps 20:13, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This was 5 days ago and it still stands. I move to replace it with the UN estimate. -- Zosodada 02:24, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Agree. The number seems less and less credible as the days go by. BanyanTree 04:36, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Unfortunately the UN doesn't cite a specific estimated number. I can't find one. The Tsunami Summit announcement does mention "double", hence a possible solution of 188,000 for the Indonesia estimate. I dosn't think anyone wants to contradict the Rusdihardjo statement. -- 152.163.101.10 05:28, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Then do people want to vote on simply deleting the 400K reference from the casualty table and leave it in the Indonesia sections and pages? The 400,000 number got picked up by a news source, which I think does nothing for our credibility. BanyanTree 05:40, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I didn't see the 400,000 number in that Everest News link. Let's blame it on the ambassador -- it was his fault! :) The misinformation implied in the "are dead bodies dangerous" paragraph is the big thorn in my side. Yes, they are dangerous and need to be handled with caution. CNN is guilty of sensationalist spin and the wiki-editor here confused the issue which has to do with the time it takes to identify a body, not leaving corpses to pile up while dinner is handed out. --

A Fast-tracked Wikireader

Is it feasable to fast-track a Wikireader on this subject (including edited tsiunami and earthquake articles, as well as pages related to this disaster) for sale. Something around 50% of profits could be donated to an agreed charity. For greatest effect this would need to be done as soon as possible. There is the option of by-passing publishers by allowing trusted users to download PDFs, print well and sell in their locales? This user would then send raised money to the Wikimedia foundation. Anyone got any ideas? --Oldak Quill 20:08, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

2004 Asian Tsunami as Article Title

I would like to propose that the current article title be changed to "2004 Asian Tsunami" ... which is short & simple.

The term "AsianTsunami" has upto 50 hits in Yahoo and "Asian Tsunami" has 1,030,000 hits. Goggles seems to be joining-in too with "AsianTsunami" at 135 hits & "Asian Tsunami" with 3,350,000 hits.

Yes, the Earthquake happened in the Indian Ocean BUT it was the Asian Tsunami that affected a pan-asian area, news agencies and the media calls it the "Asian Tsunami Disaster" to term the event ... it is easier as a reference term than your "2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake that caused massive tsunamis that effected many asian counties ..." (mouth-full)

Change the title ... please.

The tsunami was the cause of the massive deaths among the nations, not the earthquake per say ... and lots of people are calling it so NOT the Indian Ocean Tsunami or Earthquake !!!

Thank you.

Ken, Singapore

And I would like to propose that you

203.120.68.68 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) stop spamming every single article related to this topic with an external link to http://www.asiantsunami.org/

I think I will register the domain IndianOceanAsianTsunamiEarthquake.org and suggest that everyone change the name to that instead. -- Curps 01:16, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hi Curps,

I realised now why your name pops up every now and then at the "2004 Indian Ocean earthquake" ... you are the initiator. (congrats !)

I am the one that suggested the "2004 Asian Tsunami" out of good intentions to benefit the Wiki-community as this is the term frequently used by the media ... nobody except your article refers to the disaster as "Indian Ocean earthquake" as it did not cause the death tolls, it was the tsunami that killed and the world is responding to the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami, not the Indian Ocean earthquake.

Now, (let's settle some scores) ... you (Curps) have deliberately deleted my comments on the proposal of using "2004 Asian Tsunami" at "2004 Indian Ocean earthquake" article discussion site. This action is not only distasteful, it is unethical.

The deleted portions can be found at ;

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake&diff=prev&oldid=9163418

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake&diff=next&oldid=9163418

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake&diff=prev&oldid=9163447

Text that were deleted were ;

"The term "AsianTsunami" has upto 50 hits in Yahoo and "Asian Tsunami" has 1,030,000 hits. Goggles seems to be joining-in too with "AsianTsunami" at 135 hits & "Asian Tsunami" with 3,350,000 hits."

"Change the title ... please."

"The tsunami was the cause of the massive deaths among the nations, not the earthquake per say ... and lots of people are calling it so NOT the Indian Ocean Tsunami or Earthquake !!!"

My appreciation to you Curps on the maintenance for the article page but I hope you allow free speech & friendly suggestions as much as it is possible.

[User:kenkam (talk)] 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as article title

This would make more sense, as the tsunami hit some of Eastern Africa as well as Asia and all the damage was caused by the tsunami rather than the earthquate itself, jguk 19:03, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

- maybe but I will disagree at the moment, since this is a cause-and-affect issue; ... ~ RoboAction 00:04, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)