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    Notable Tsunamis 3

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    Notable Tsunamis 3

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    ben
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    Notable tsunamis 3

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    Notable Tsunamis 3

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    Notable tsunamis

    One of the most destructive tsunamis in antiquity took place in the eastern Mediterranean
    Sea on July 21, 365 CE. A fault slip in the subduction zone beneath the island of Crete
    produced an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 8.0–8.5, which was powerful
    enough to raise parts of the western third of the island to 10 meters (33 feet). The
    earthquake spawned a tsunami that claimed tens of thousands of lives and caused
    widespread damage throughout the Mediterranean, from islands in the Aegean Sea
    westward to the coast of present-day Spain. Tsunami waves pushed ships over harbor
    walls and onto the roofs of houses in Alexandria, Egypt, while also ruining nearby
    croplands by inundating them with salt water.
    Perhaps the most destructive tsunami in recorded history took place on December 26,
    2004, after an earthquake of magnitude 9.1 displaced the ocean floor off the Indonesian
    island of Sumatra. Two hours later, waves as high as 9 meters (30 feet) struck the eastern
    coasts of India and Sri Lanka, some 1,200 km (750 miles) away. Within seven hours of
    the quake, waves washed ashore on the Horn of Africa, more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles)
    away on the other side of the Indian Ocean. More than 200,000 people were killed, most
    of them in Sumatra but thousands of others in Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka, and smaller
    numbers in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Maldives, Somalia, and other locations.
    On March 11, 2011, seafloor displacement resulting from a magnitude-9.0 earthquake in
    the Japan Trench of the Pacific Ocean created a large tsunami that devastated much of
    the eastern coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu. Waves measuring as much as 10
    meters (33 feet) high struck the city of Sendai and other low-lying coastal regions of
    Miyagi prefecture as well as coastal areas in the prefectures of Iwate, Fukushima, Ibaraki,
    and Chiba. The tsunami also instigated a major nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi
    power station along the coast.
    One of the most notable prehistoric tsunamis took place during the K-T extinction, a global
    extinction event that eliminated approximately 80 percent of all animal species about 66
    million years ago. Many scientists argue that the event was mostly caused by the impact
    of a large meteor or comet on the Yucatán Peninsula near Chicxulub, Mexico. The impact
    caused an enormous 1.6-km- (1-mile) tall tsunami that washed up on the shores of the
    Gulf of Mexico and the islands of the Caribbean before propagating across the Atlantic
    Ocean and other ocean basins.
    Other tsunamis of note include those that followed the spectacular explosive eruption of
    the Krakatoa (Krakatau) volcano on August 26 and 27, 1883 and the Chile earthquake of
    1960. A series of blasts from Krakatoa submerged the island of Rakata between Sumatra
    and Java, creating waves as high as 35 meters (115 feet) in many East Indies localities,
    and killing more than 36,000 people. The largest earthquake ever recorded (magnitude
    9.5) took place in 1960 off the coast of Chile, and it caused a tsunami that killed
    approximately 2,000 people in Chile, 61 people 15 hours later in Hawaii, and 122 people
    22 hours later in Japan.

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