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Tsunami: Scientists Watched Helplessly

By Jeralyn, Section Foreign Affairs
Posted on Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 10:29:06 AM EST
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There is an excellent seven page (internet length) article in the New York Times, How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly. A snippet:

For those on the shores of the affected countries, the reckoning with the tsunami's power came all but out of the blue, and cost them their lives.....For the scientists in Hawaii, at the planet's main tsunami center, who managed to send out one of the rare formal warnings, there was intense frustration. They had useful information; they were trained to get word out; but they were stymied by limitations, including a lack of telephone numbers for counterparts in other countries.

What makes the article so compelling is that it is personalized. It is a recounting of what individual scientists around the world have said when interviewed.

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    Tsunami: Scientists Watched Helplessly | 3 comments (3 topical)
    Re: Tsunami: Scientists Watched Helplessly (none / 0) (#1)
    by Kitt on Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 03:55:01 PM EST
    On one of the Asian blogs you had listed, a guy from Sri Lanka wrote about how he just stared, frozen, at the water - it wasn't from any kind fear necessarily - just awe and an 'inability' to move due to witnessing that kind of powerful awesomeness.

    Re: Tsunami: Scientists Watched Helplessly (none / 0) (#2)
    by Richard Aubrey on Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 07:28:17 PM EST
    When things are not as they are supposed to be, on a grand scale, the mind sometimes freezes. I knew an orthopedic surgeon who, early in his practice before dedicated ER specialists, was covering the local emergency ward. A victim of a bad accident was brought in, really messed up. The doc said he froze, and the reason was not that he was grossed out but that a pattern which is supposedly immutable--the shape of the human body--had been changed to an unrecognizable shape. I can see freezing at a tsunami the first time. Survivors probably wouldn't if they saw another one.

    Re: Tsunami: Scientists Watched Helplessly (none / 0) (#3)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Mon Jan 03, 2005 at 09:47:54 PM EST
    To those interested and able to follow this article on "Basic Relations between Tsunamis Calculations and Their Physics," I am posting the URL link to the html version of this pdf file (which is also available from the link), from a very specialized scientific journal Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol 21, Number 3 (2003) page 173): that's part II of the article. It's way way way over my head, but my husband, who's a prof. of chemistry and physics, had downloaded it onto the hard drive of our home computer (which is mostly used by me) while I was away at a conference (when the tsunamis hit two weekends ago now), so I'm able to share the link. As the extensive NYT article that TL linked earlier suggests, citing scientists from around the world, they were able to predict the likelihood of the tsunamis through their calculations once they got the magnitude of the earthquake closer to 9.0 (at first, 8.0 didn't concern them, but a revised calculation of 8.9 did). Unfortunately, they were generally either too late to warn most of the coastal areas and isolated islands or other districts in the Indian Ocean (as opposed to the Pacific, where there is a warning system in place for tsunamis); or, when they tried, they found that the scientists were unable to contact the proper governmental and local Indian Ocean authorities in time to make an impact on saving lives. Their frustrations, chagrin, and sadness are very clearly expressed in the article. (For the record, I did already make it a point to thank those who are serving or who have served on the U.S. Naval Base at Diego Garcia for posting their firsthand or retrospective impressions. If the thread has gone off-track, I suggest perhaps scrolling back to read or re-read what they have written. Thanks again.

    Tsunami: Scientists Watched Helplessly | 3 comments (3 topical)