[Editor's note: See the whole Decade's Top 10 Earth Stories]
Viewed from space, perhaps, or the disinterested bird's eye views of computer simulations, the great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of 2004 would've been a quiet, curious event; a seismic pebble dropped in the Indian Ocean.
To the small humans inhabiting this planet, the ripples that spread from Indonesia to the shores of East Africa were far more significant, a horrifying example of what Earth's tectonic twitches are capable of. The magnitude 9.1 temblor and the massive tsunami that followed claimed close to a quarter of a million lives, making it one of the worst natural disasters in history.
It was a brutal wake-up call. Somehow people had managed to forget about the power of tsunamis, despite several dramatic examples in the last few centuries alone.
But in the aftermath of the disaster, tsunami research has enjoyed a renaissance of funding and media attention. It's common knowledge, for example, that the giant quake sped up Earth's rotation and wobbled its axis. Efforts to educate people living in tsunami-prone areas have been stepped up -- are they sufficient? Hard to say. But the threat continues to assert itself, as exemplified by the waves that struck Samoa earlier this year.
One hopes the memory and lessons of the 2004 disaster will not fade.
Image: NOAA
Tags: Earthquakes, Floods, Geophysics, Natural Disasters, Tsunami
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