I recall watching the news the morning after Christmas a decade ago at a big family gathering and seeing the first reports of the massive tsunami hitting Indonesia and Thailand. The horror that followed was the stuff of nightmares. Nearly 250,000 people died.
When I see America go into full panic mode the first chance it gets, whether it's a terrorist threat or a contagious disease (not to mention the inept response to Hurricane Katrina) I can only imagine what we'd do if this happened to us.
According to Tad Murty, vice-president of the Tsunami Society, the total energy of the tsunami waves was equivalent to about five megatons of TNT (20 petajoules). This is more than twice the total explosive energy used during all of World War II (including the two atomic bombs) but still a couple of orders of magnitude less than the energy released in the earthquake itself. In many places the waves reached as far as 2 km (1.2 mi) inland.
