In view of the tragic reports here recently of conditons on board the USS Lincoln, I thought it might be helpful to remind those who were puzzled why it was in Indonesian waters. This image should clear up any residual puzzlement.
Thanks to Carol (cskinner) for hosting this image for me.
That picture just screamed ‘Photoshop’
A trip to Snopes proved it. It is a modified picture of Antofagasta in Chile.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/tsunami/tsunami2.asp
Mukade
My apologies. I assumed my source had checked before circulating this.
I somehow don’t think that much affects the point I was making.
It’s a cool picture though. BTW, was anyone actually wondering why the Lincoln was in Indonesia?
I actually did wonder about the size of the wave but my source is, as they say in the trade, ‘usually reliable.’ When you take into account the elevation, perhaps it did look something like this to the people on the ground just about to be hit.
That Snopes site says a four metre wave but that is considerably smaller in height than some regular surf I think, and that doesn’t do any damage at all except to surfers.
The danger of a tsunami is not in its height, but in its power. It is not an ordinary wave - more an almost solid wall of water moving at high speed.
A tsunami only 3m above the normal tide is very dangerous because the volume of water behind the wave front causes most of the damage.
A Japanese TV programme had one of their reporters sit in an artificial wave generator to show the difference. A 1m high, ordinary wave had no effect on the unlucky reporter, but a simulated tsunami of the same height knocked him flat. The professor who conducted the simulation said, although a tsunami is made of water, you should think of it as a solid object.
It seems that many photo-shoppers on the net would prefer the wave to have looked more dramatic. It is almost as if many people are disapointed it was not like the movie Deep Impact.
Mukade
Looking at the original video footage, I figured it had to be something like that. Is it that there is a wall of water say, four metres high, but very much deeper than a normal wave? Is that the source of the additional power? To break the shore line, a four metre tsunami is going to have to simulate a much taller wave at the point of impact with the shore or it simply isn’t going to go any further, no matter the force behind it.
That footage also explained something that had puzzled me. I often wondered why tsunamis used to be called tidal waves in English when they have nothing to do with tides. Some of the footage I saw showed a fierce undercurrent that dragged the sea out way past the low tide line; then of course the next wave comes in way past the high tide line. Sort of mimics speeded up and greatly exaggerated tidal movements.
They weren’t in Indonesia at the time.
They’d been on deployment in the Western Pacific (a “WestPac” deployment as it’s known to Sailors and Marines) for about 6 or 7 months and were sent there within 48 hours of the disaster.
Here’s a link to a website showing (hopefully for real) before & after picures of Banda Aceh. Looks to be satellite photos? No waves but the receding water shot is amazing, plenty of devastation, and still impossible to actually conceive from my safe place in the Appalachian foothills.
http://homepage.mac.com/demark/tsunami/9.html
~Judy