Quote:
Originally Posted by rubytuesday
I was in thailand for christmas in 2004. The boxing day tsunami was the scariest and worst moment ever, and I was on a hijacked plane once! not just scary though, it was too devastating for words. You could see people who were on the ground and had nothing to hang onto being swept under and afterwards you'd see people amongst all the rubbish. I was able to leave but I almost felt worse for doing that when you see the images of the thousands that were just left there with nothing.
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wow! What a story! How awful.
In the summer of 2005, researchers at Columbia University made available a startling -- a shocking -- audio file that was finally circulated to the public.
When the megathrust quake off the Sumatra coast occurred, the subduction fault (the Sumatra-Andaman Fault) ruptured from south to north -- at a speed of over 6,000 mph -- like a giant zipper.
When an undersea earthquake occurs, it creates sound waves known as
T waves. There are underwater microphones at select locations throughout the world that can pick up T waves & other energy pulses, and these microphones picked up the T waves of the Boxing Day Quake & recorded them.
It's an awe-inspiring listen. In this MP3, you can hear the two distinct phases of the great quake as the fault ruptures from a point on the south end to a point on the north end -- about 750 miles in all.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/zw1c38
During the first phase, which lasted about three minutes, the fault unzipped northward at about 1.7 miles per second. During the second phase, the rupture slowed to 1.3 miles per second & continued north for another five minutes until it reached a plate boundary where the fault changes from subduction to strike-slip (like the San Andreas).
Enjoy the MP3! It's haunting.