The day after Christmas in 2004, a massive earthquake shook the ocean floor, sending a tsunami rippling through the Indian Ocean. When that surge reached the shore — from Thailand to Africa — it left more than 250,000 people missing or dead in 12 countries. Millions more lost their homes.
Hermann Fritz, a renowned tsunami expert in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, did extensive research after the disaster, and he recently talked about the event a decade later. (Read more about how people in the affected areas remembered the anniversary.)
Banda Aceh City, Sumatra, Indonesia, shown in Digital Globe satellite images. On the right, before the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Afterward, on the left, much of the city is destroyed. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that caused the massive tsunami occurred just off the coast of northern Sumatra.
Q:Where would you place the 2004 tsunami in the span of recorded events like this? |
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A:The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is by far the deadliest tsunami in recorded history. There have, of course, been other mega-disasters over the past decade with death tolls exceeding 100,000 — Cyclone Nargis in 2008 in Myanmar (or Burma), the 2010 Haiti earthquake, or even farther back, the 1970 Cyclone Bhola in Bangladesh. All of these mega-disasters were amplified because they impacted very vulnerable and densely populated locations. All them occurred in the Indian Ocean. |
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Kolhufushi Island, Meemu Atoll, Maldives, after a tsunami ricocheted around the Indian Ocean December 26, 2004. (All Photos Courtesy of Hermann Fritz.) |
Q:Tell me about the work you did after the tsunami. |
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A: Up to 2004, my research was centered on tsunamis generated by landslides. Then, overnight phone calls with the leading tsunami pioneer, Professor Costas Synolakis from USC (University of Southern California) provided the opportunity to join and be trained by Costas, the leading expert, on my first international tsunami survey team in Sri Lanka a week after the tsunami. That was a colossal effort, with multiple survey teams orchestrated by Professor Phil Liu from Cornell. |
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An eyewitness interview in Sri Lanka: - Hermann Fritz, who spent years studying the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which struck a dozen countries and killed 250,000 people. |
Q:What did we learn from the tsunami and its aftermath? |
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A:The tsunami research community collected over 1,000 tsunami heights along the shores of the Indian Ocean, providing detailed runup heights and inundation limit distributions. The tourist photos from Thailand and tide gauge records highlight an initial draw down [of seawater as the tides retreat ahead of the arriving tsunami] on the overriding plate side of the fault rupture (in this case the east coast of the Indian Ocean basin). [When we see this, it] can serve as a last warning for evacuation. Unfortunately many tsunami unaware residents used the moment to collect fish stranded on the dry seafloor rather than evacuating. |
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“One of the places I stayed in during the field work in Galle, Sri Lanka, was the ruins of a hotel flooded by the tsunami. Of course, the ‘hotel’ had no windows and was just a concrete framework. The rooms on the highest floor, the third floor, were partially usable as they were flooded only about 1 m deep. Nevertheless, when lying down to rest at night, I could see the mud line left by the tsunami on the walls of the room — above my head.”
A house in Sri Lanka left without most of its structure after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that struck the day after Christmas.
Q:Would things be different if this happened this year instead of a decade ago? |
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A:Absolutely. Incredible progress has been made over the past decade with the installation of global tsunami warning systems and implementation of tsunami hazard zone mapping and evacuation and education programs. Perhaps most importantly since 2004, the word “tsunami” has become a household name. The tsunami warning systems will primarily serve populations at a regional distance and in the far field where the earthquake is not felt. |
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Q:Have you been back to the region? What’s it like now? |
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A:I have been back to some of the less-impacted regions of Indonesia and Oman. I have only seen photos from the hardest-hit areas over the years. |
The mosque in Lhoknga, Indonesia, a town where 7,000 of the 8,000 resident died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. “The mosque sits half a mile off the beach [but] remained standing due to its well-built structure and open prayer halls that converted the building into a kind of pier during the tsunami,” said Hermann Fritz, who studied the disaster extensively in the years afterward. “Survivors climbed the roof as a spontaneous vertical evacuation platform. It barely remained dry.”
Q:How much do we still NOT know when it comes to these kinds of disasters? |
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A:The most fundamental thing still remains unsolved: nobody can predict an earthquake. So tsunami warnings only start in the minutes after the earthquake. Warning times have been reduced from tens of minutes to a few minutes after the earthquake. The fastest warning, in most cases, remains the earthquake itself for residents nearby. There are a few mysterious exceptions, such as slow earthquakes, which are highly [likely to cause a] tsunami but are barely felt by the coastal residents until the tsunami arrives. |