Death toll and disasters
I heard about the tsunamis on Saturday night on the radio, but I thought they said the death toll in Sri Lanka was somewhere around 300, and the total from all areas not much more than that. I figured that was bad (especially for the people who died), but not on the scale of the really big disasters.
But the latest Reuters article puts the total death toll at 68,000. And presumably still rising. (The article says over 32,000 of those are in Indonesia; nearly 22,000 in Sri Lanka; nearly 12,500 in India. That's more than one in a thousand people in Sri Lanka; the total population there is about 20 million people.)
That 68,000 is a hard number to wrap my head around. For comparison, it's nearly twice as many as were killed by the tsunami from Krakatoa's eruption in 1883, according to the article. Also, it's more than one and a half times the total number of people killed in auto accidents in the US in 1999. It approaches the number of people who died in the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II. It's twenty times the number of people who died in the WTC attacks.
It's a hell of a lot of people.
Also: "The tremor, the biggest in 40 years, may have caused the Earth to wobble on its axis, permanently accelerating its rotation and shortening days by a fraction of a second, U.S. scientists said." (Thanks, Will.)
Anyway, regardless of the number of people who died, of course the survivors are the ones who need help now; I haven't seen estimates on how many people are without food, water, shelter, medical care, fuel, electricity, livelihoods, etc.
There are a lot of different places you can go for information and to provide donations, if you're so inclined. Among others, Google has a Tsunami Relief page with a few links.
While I'm being gloomy, I may as well point to a New York Times opinion piece, "When Nature's Wrath Is History's Reminder," by Dennis Smith. Most interesting (and scary) bit:
Oddly, a tsunami cannot be felt as it passes ships on the open ocean, for the wave is usually small, one to two feet, and traveling very fast, as fast as airliners. It is only as it approaches shallow water that it begins to break; as the bottom of the wave slows, the top keeps traveling at the higher speed and increases in height, hitting landfall at 30 to 40 miles an hour. In 1958, an earthquake in Lituya Bay, Alaska, caused a landslide into the ocean that created a tsunami 1,720 feet high, a wave that could have swept over the Empire State Building. Fortunately it headed into a wilderness area and did not travel across the ocean to Hawaii or Japan.
The possibility of great landmasses falling into the ocean is always with us, and recently scientists found vertical fault lines through a volcano on La Palma, one of the smaller and more westward Canary Islands. The volcano has a crater about five miles wide and a half-mile high, and erupts about every 200 years. The last eruption was in 1948, but the newly discovered fault lines have convinced some scientists that eventually the huge crater will break apart and slide into the ocean, bringing more than a half-trillion tons of rock with it.
Since tsunamis are created in proportion to the amount of land that has fallen into the water, this event would likely create a wave mass never before known to written history, many times bigger than the wave at Lituya Bay. The wave would diminish a little as it crossed the Atlantic, but if it hit the Atlantic Seaboard it could be higher than the skyscrapers of Boston, New York, Washington and Miami. Scientists do not know if it will take one, four, or 10 eruptions to separate the landmass, only that the separation is inevitable.
As mega-disaster scenarios go, that's not quite on a par with the Yellowstone Park supervolcano scenario, nor with an asteroid hitting Earth. But still on a scale that's hard to imagine. I don't think I can imagine a wave that's 1700 feet high. A third of a mile. Five or six football fields. Taller than the world's tallest buildings. Oh, and fifty times the height of the highest tsunamis over this past weekend.
I think on that note it's about time for me to go to bed.
