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Monday, May 14, 2007

Tsunami

Tsunamis are tidal waves formed by underwater earthquakes or, much less frequently, by volcanic eruptions - meteor impacts - or underwater landslides. They that can exceed 400 miles per hours in the deep ocean.
In deep water a tsunami may only be inches - or a few feet high. But when it reaches a shoreline that energies becomes a wall of water that can be a mile high.
Since 1990, there have been 82 tsunamis, out of which 10 have claimed more than 4,000 lives.
According to researchers, there is a significant rise both in numbers of waves and in death tolls over the century. Up until the now - the average per decade has been 57. The increase in tsunamis reported is due to improved global communications; the high death are partly due to increases in coastal populations.
The word Tsunami comes from the Japanese tsu and nami . Appropriate naming, as some 80 percent of all tsunamis occur in the Pacific Ocean and Japan has suffered many, some coming from as far away as South America. Tsunamis are often incorrectly called tidal waves, but tides have nothing to do with them (though the damage may be worse if a tsunami hits at high tide).
A tsunami (pronounced tsoo-nah-mee) is a wave train, or series of waves, generated in a body of water by an impulsive disturbance that vertically displaces the water column. Earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, explosions, and even the impact of cosmic bodies, such as meteorites, can generate tsunamis. Tsunamis can savagely attack coastlines, causing devastating property damage and loss of life.
Tsunamis are unlike wind-generated waves, which many of us may have observed on a local lake or at a coastal beach, in that they are characterized as shallow-water waves, with long periods and wave lengths. The wind-generated swell one sees at a after another, might have a period of about 10 seconds and a wave length of 150 m. A tsunami, on the other hand, can have a wavelength in excess of 100 km and period on the order of one hour.
As a result of their long wave lengths, tsunamis behave as shallow-water waves. A wave becomes a shallow-water wave when the ratio between the water - travels at about 200 m/s, or over 700 km/hr. Because the rate at which a wave loses its energy is inversely related to its wave length, tsunamis not only propagate at high speeds, they can also travel great, transoceanic distances with limited energy losses.
Tsunamis can be generated when the sea floor abruptly deforms and vertically displaces the overlying water. Tectonic earthquakes are a particular kind of earthquake that are associated with the earth's crustal deformation; when these earthquakes occur created.
Large vertical movements of the earth's crust can occur at plate boundaries. Plates interact along these boundaries called faults. Around the margins of the Pacific Ocean, for example, denser oceanic plates slip under continental plates in a process known as subduction. Subduction earthquakes are particularly effective in generating tsunamis.
A tsunami can be generated by any disturbance that displaces a large water mass from its equilibrium position. In the case of earthquake-generated tsunamis, can also disturb the overlying water column as sediment and rock slump downslope and are redistributed across the sea floor. Similarly, a violent submarine volcanic eruption can create an impulsive force that uplifts the water column and generates a tsunami. Conversely, supermarine landslides and cosmic-body impacts disturb the water from above, as momentum from falling debris is transferred to the water into which the debris falls. Generally area.
One of the worst tsunami disasters engulfed whole villages along Sanriku, Japan, in 1896. A wave more than seven stories tall drowned some 26,000 people. More than 30,000 people died in Java from a 1883 tsunami cause by a volcanic eruption.



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