This link was sent to me by my brother -
http:// http://coreykoberg.com/Tsunami/
Shows the tsumani wave coming ashore and people watching it.
Here on N.H. seacoast we get strong ocean storms and the waves come over the sea wall - inevitably there are people who stand at the wall watching the waves come in - as the people in the picture are doing - unaware of the danger. It's a dangerous thing to do. Waves pull up debris from the ocean floor, including large rocks which can kill because of the force of the water. Then as the wave receded with the tidal pull, you can be knocked off your feet and caught by the water.
In Hawaii, where they suffered a terrible tsunami in 1946 they say that if you can see the wave it is too late to run.
I guess my message is this : if there is a coastal storm, resist the urge to go to the shore and watch the ocean. http://www.drgeorgepc.com/Tsunami1946.html
For technical information on the Pacific warning system, just Google "Hawaii tsunami."

first link--edited
http://coreykoberg.com/Tsunami/

The waves were so...brown. The enormous power of it must have scooped up unimaginable amounts of sand to turn the waves so brown. And the people! There were smiles, I honestly believe, on many of the faces. Our church at large has organized a fund for relief along with man power. This will certainly be a practice among many relief agencies, churches and other organizations.

my son, Chellis, and I noticed the smiles, too, dub-dub. I hope for them all that they made it through.

Awesome--literally. Thanks, wow (and Helen). I had thought, since becoming friends with Bingley, that if you could somehow put a long rod through the earth starting here, it would come out somewhere in Indonesia. Our newspaper this morning said that it took 16 minutes for the seismographs in New Madrid, Kentucky, to register the activity that started the tsunamis. Sixteen minutes to get straight through the earth.
"All of our weak-motion stations picked it up, from Grayson, up near Carter Caves, down to Ballard County and Hickman County," said University of Kentucky geophysicist Edward Woolery. "We're pretty much on the opposite side of the globe, so it was pretty much a straight shot through from directly below. It's amazing, and on the seismogram you can see that it goes on for about half an hour ... where just the whole Earth is ringing like a bell."
http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2005/01/02ky/B1-byron0102-5551.html

Stunning. Left of frame 8: one just looks at the young child on a parent's shoulders with a maelstrom breaking upon them... the fate of so many captured in a single image.

Me too, Maverick, my eyes were immediately drawn to the fleeing man with the child on his back. And praying.

This set of photos will probably tell the story of this humbling tragedy for years to come...

The macabre brown color of the bluegreen sea.
The confused shrieks of fear and laughter of the running crowd.

I wonder where the waves pass most quickly? I would guess the core since its made nearly entirely of iron.

No Wordwind, that is illogical. Iron is dense. All waves must move more slowly in density.

I am so smart.

Oh, well. My instincts were off. Still, it's amazing to consider those waves having moved through the earth in sixteen minutes, even if slowed down to a crawl through the core.

themilum:

You may be smart, but on this one I suspect you are incorrect. Waves of mechanical energy move more quickly through denser material as a general rule.

Sound travels faster underwater than it does through the air, by a considerable margin:

"Therefore, the speed of sound is about four times faster in water than in air." http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/NickyDu.shtml

From the same source "The speed of sound in a medium can be determined by the equation...

v = (B/ñ)1/2 (this 1/2 is in the original text an exponent, meaning that the velocity of sound is the square root of the ratio B/ñ)

Where...

v is the speed of sound,
B is the bulk modulus of elasticity, and
ñ (rho) is the density.

The bulk modulus of elasticity, also known as the compressibility, is the relationship between pressure and volume. It is a measure of how much an increase in pressure would decrease the volume."

It's my understanding that the nature of a seismic wave is sound, that is a longitudinal mechanical wave of energy. The Earth rings "like a bell" when there is seismic activity.

Whether the waves of sound move more slowly through the iron core of the earth is basically a matter of the elasticity or lack thereof of the iron core. Take as an example a ball made of rubber. If you hit it (make a sound) on one side, the elasticity is such that it deadens the sound (which is the same thing as saying that the speed of sound in the medium rubber is slowed to zero.) Not the same when you strike the side of an iron ball. My guess is that the bulk modulus of the iron core of the earth is really high, because it is already compressed greatly. Any sound hitting it is going to go right through (and very quickly) because the iron cannot further compress.


TEd

Is anyone else able to get that page up today? It gives me just an error message now; did the site encounter a virtual tsunam-e?

loaded fine for me, but I noticed that he's getting hit pretty hard. 88,000 hits yesterday. 210,000 today...

I got it up clean, Maverick. Be sure you remember to click on of troy and not wow, for best results.
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Well kick my shin and call me shiny, TEd, of course you are right! Heat slows, and rigity accelerates, wave speed. And even though the larger part of the core is liquid and wave speed dissipates with dispersal, overall speeds are higher as they go through the rigid core.
So what, you say? And so what, you'd be right!

I take back that part about me being smart, Wordwind.

And here's a URL with relative wave speeds as they go through the core.

http:// http://eqseis.geosc.psu.edu/~cammon/HTML/Classes/IntroQuakes/Notes/waves_and_interior.html

> remember to click on of troy

Allus did :)

Thanks, yes, loading OK now so I guess the site was just overwhelmed at first try earlier.

These photos have been snoped:

http://snopes.com/photos/natural/tsunami.asp

nice.

it's like all the crime there you're hearing about now... people are just...

remember to click on of troy

Allus did :)

You can hit on me, too, Mav dear if you want.. i wouldn't say no...

Well for heaven's sake. Here I've been trying to get a couple of friends (the ones who always get all excited over those pass-around myths) here in town to always check with snopes; and it never even occurred to me that these pictures might not be what they purported to.

Thanks, faldage, for snooping up snopes.