I haven’t blogged anything about the tsunami and devastation in South Asia, largely because it’s superfluous — there are any number of fine blogs (some created to the purpose) and news orgs covering the story. Still, it’s simply astonishing in terms of magnitude (not even counting the 9.0 earthquake that triggered it) as well as the destruction and loss of life.
Mercifully, the coverage I’ve heard has been mostly about the disaster and the immediate recovery efforts. The spinning of Bigger Meaning (whether it’s “It was caused by Bush-created Global Warming” or “See, a Sign of the Apocalypse Unleashed Against Unbelievers”) has been, mercifully, missing so far. Just wait.
One odd side note: I have to wonder how many news organizations had already pasted together (or even sent to print) their “Biggest Stories of 2004” — not realizing that one of the biggest stories would happen in the last week of the year. It would be sadly ironic if, from an historic perspective, this disaster ends up under-reported due to end-of-the-year news cycles.
Too late…
The local wing-nut radio was been nothing but “Baby jesus punishes heathen unbelievers” for the past two days.
Idiots…
Also, I read this morning that most of the islands in the two near-by chains moved at least 20 Meters.
Ponder that for a minute…20 Meters.
9.0 quakes are Finger-Thwack of God magnitude. Yeesh.
Maybe we can move some of those radio commentators over to the next tsunami, so they can demonstrate how their faith protects them from 10m waves.
Here’s a sobering (or mind-blowing) analysis of what a 9.0 quake actually means. Including that the island of Sumatra — the whole island, larger than California — evidently has shifted 100 feet.
The. Whole. Island.
This was the sort of thing that, in days gone by, destroyed civilizations, founded (or ended) religions, and made for mythologies. Crikey.
For what it’s worth, Arthur C. Clarke is okay.
And now Reuters has this:
Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth’s center during the quake on Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or one millionth of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch (2.5 cm) on its axis.
And this:
Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned — the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island’s coast, but they can’t find any dead animals.
I’d read about the possibility of the microseconds increase, but that nobody would know for several weeks (at which point the cumulative effect would be large enough to measure and confirm).