Chennai: During the morning hours on this date, 14 years ago, giants waves struck Tamilnadu coasts taking away countless lives.
The massive Tsunami by any modern standard was not known about by majority till then. The M9.3 earthquake that caused it emanated from a point near the west coast of Sumatra.
It moved the seafloor by 10-20 m vertically and displaced trillions of tonnes of undersea rock, rippling through the 1,000-km-long Andaman plate boundary.
The tsunami created as a result slammed into the coasts of 11 countries, from east Africa to Thailand, killing over 200,000 people. Notwithstanding the several minutes to several hours between the quake and the tsunami reaching the costs, coastal communities were caught completely by surprise.
There were no tsunami warning systems in place. There wasn’t any social memory of previous tsunamis preserved in the community psyche either that might have helped deal with such disastrous situations.
The 2004 disaster was considered unprecedented at the time in its magnitude as well as transoceanic reach. Except for some isolated voices, the international research community had failed to anticipate such power lurking along India’s eastern seaboard. The region has since witnessed many technological advances.
The authorities have deployed offshore and deep ocean tsunami-observation systems, becoming able to issue early tsunamis warnings.
The Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, with inputs from the India Meteorological Department, now tracks realtime quake data from a seismic network in the region.
In the same vein, the last 14 years have also been scientifically productive. During the last decade, many studies have endeavoured to understand the 2004 quake’s physics.
Geological, seismological and GPS-based geodetic studies have focused on earthquake source properties, crustal deformation, tsunami sources and potential, and long-term forecasts.