What amazes me about this tsunami
 

Is that the few amateur shots i saw of the wave hitting the beaches and shit is that it was a totally lousy wave. I mean i see waves in Hawai 5 times as high. Also the water hits the beaches and streets but it doesnt look like much is happening while other shots show the water going through the streets like crazy swallowing everything on its path.
Its like theres something missing. Im still waiting to see shots of a super high wave hitting the cost but there isnt any...know what i mean?

:action-sm

I think it was the speed that = the power.

They say it was going 600 kmh, and that is fast.

dont you think that most of the great shots of wave were taken by people who are dead now........

My guess is the video you're seeing is from the areas not hit as hard. The places that were "wiped out" had no one there to video tape them.

Either way, what a tragedy.

Uh.....

same reason theres no good video or pics from people standing on the ridge of an erupting volcano.

Battuss, most of the vids you see show the first 1-2 small waves. As far as I understand there were six of them.

As if people standing on roofs cant make videos.

500 mph X 1 mile deep X 4,000 miles wide = disaster

This satellite pic below will give you a better perspective of what kinds of waves weren't videotaped.

http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/...c26_2004_dg.jpg

nothing there

The waves that we see on most pics are probably small ones. But it must have took one big mother of a wave to kill all those people.

Pics not linked properly

i think the vids and pics you are seein are AFTER the first waves hit, so they went and got their camera.. notice that theres no running ppl... its all just stuff and water... imagine how full of ppl it was before the first waves hit... and imagine where those ppl are now....

Phuket is FILLED with ppl almost like a NYC street in the morning around this time of year... think about that.

Yikes!!!

Sorry...Here it is...

http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/t...26_2004_dg.jpg

Yep, the speed is the power. You see the wave hitting land and not stopping but continueing until very far inland taking cars and busses with it as if they were frisbees

Tsunami's in open ocean move at about 500 mph.

They slow to around 45 mph as they reach shore and rise up.

The impact from the tsunami hit thousands of miles of shoreline with varying levels of severity.
Also many fatalities were from people being knocked around in the water full of debris like a washing machine. A few bashes from some cement blocks and car parts will take you out.

they are just faking it for all those donations :rolleyes

those numbers are quite scarry :(

Holy shit, that pic look unreal, like a photoshop with a swirl in it. Insane! So many death... :Oh crap

That is one tall ass wave.

To answer the dummy's question, Hawaii has beaches where the big waves are, they have somewhere to break, and the waves have not been building for miles and miles with the force of the earth's plates behind them.

Kind of like the difference between Aimee Sweet doing a cannonball into a pool and dropping a freight train into the same pool.

One makes a little splash, the other destroys the pool.

Yep. It's like hitting a concrete wall. From my understanding if the object is flying at 11mph at a stationary body, it can fracture a human skull so i am thinking that going 100+mph can really do some damage. :(

Damn that is an amazing pic...

well im sure footage will emerge

I wonder how a 42 Ft. boat would feel crashing down on your skull while you were wedged between a building and the boat at 500 MPH..it's not the water by itself that killed.

Watch this video...

http://tsunami.nea-online.net/KATC.wmv

I know what you mean. I was looking for the 50 foot high Tsunami video like in the movies given all the tourists with camcorders. The one they keep showing of the wave breaking over the pool is like any seawall on an average day.

As was said in above posts maybe the big waves didn't hit the tourist areas or maybe all those camcorders are floating around with bodies right now.

However, there is a lot of misinformation in this thread.

For all you living in cave for the last week, the waves don't hit the beach at 100 200 300 or more miles per hour. They slow down dramatically depending on the shape of the ocean floor as they approach the coast. There was one report I read of a guy that saw the first wave coming and was getting all his family off the beach into a building when he realized his son was still down the beach. He had time to run down to the waters edge grab his son and got about 50 yards before the wave caught up with them (they survived)..He wouldn't have been able to do this with a 100 MPH wave.

Waves in Hawaii do start hundreds or thousands of miles away, from storms and occasionally earthquakes near Japan, Alaska etc. There is nothing to stop them reaching Hawaii without losing strength as it's all open ocean. The shape of the beach determines what the water will do when it gets there but the bigger swell at Waimea washes over the road on occasion.

Everyone greatly underestimates the power of water; well actually its momentum. Momentum comes from mass and speed. If you have one or the other or both you have a lot of momentum.

It only takes water one foot deep flowing at ten miles per hour to knock you off your feet. So think about the power of a large mass of water say five feet deep flowing at 30 MPH up the beach and one mile inland. If you are in its path you will be carried away inland and then carried back out to sea, repeated four or five times as you get hit by everything along the way. Stationary suff like trees and buildings as well as debri that is moving like you are.

xclusive "Damn that is an amazing pic... "


Not sure i'd call Battus amazing, but to each his own.

That's not a picture of a tsunami according to the newspaper in front of me. Hrm.

Yes, but these particular waves were going 500+ miles per hour when they hit. One of the waves was 60 feet high.

Imagine that. A 60 foot wall slamming into your hut at 500 miles per hour.

I give up. I would like to officially announce my retirement from my campaign to educate people that the waves don't hit the beach at 500+ MPH. :1orglaugh

And it is a picture of?

I think this is the pic of the tsunami as it's coming in. The other one is a shot shortly after it hit i believe.

http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/t...26_2004_dg.jpg

That pic doesn't even look real. Crazy.

nope there is water inland already in that shot

I certainly don't claim to know the science involved one way or the other, it's just what I heard.

In any case it was devastating, and sad. That I am sure everyone would agree on.

There's also water inland in the other shot. There were smaller waves before the large one hit weren't there? I think that would explain it. I don't know that the one i posted is actually the tsunami. I wouldn't really know how to tell from such a picture. It looks more likely to me from a layman's point of view. But yeah, just that the newspaper in front of me has a before and after pic, and the first one posted is the after pic. Maybe they got it wrong. I dunno.

Okay, i don't think the one i posted is the actual tsunami either. It looks very similar to picture number 2 on this slideshow (same pic?), which was taken 4 hours after it hit. The one posted before mine is the picture after (number 3) and according to that website is showing the water receding.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/4134703.stm

I wonder if any satellite pictures actually caught the wave itself as it was about to hit the shore. Call it morbid curiousity, but i really want to see what it looks like.

Good post. :thumbsup

Maybe you're looking for it to break like the surfable waves in Hawaii. This was already said but how a wave breaks is basied upon the floor of the ocean at the point where it comes in. Hawaii just happens to have nice breaking waves. These tsunami waves are just walls of water that come surging on to the land.

You'll have to watch a few hundred vids to get a better idea of how powerful those things were.

wow that shit was moving fast :helpme

the thing about this is that it was "unexpected" as in... no one knew it was coming. How do you video tape something that you don't know is there until it's on top of you?

That's why there was so much death and destruction in the first place. The vids and pics you see are from people who realized AFTER it all started and even then it was well after because your first reaction is to freak out, find safety and THEN film.

If people knew about it ahead of time, then yes... there would have been some pics and vids of the initial waves hitting.

there are some vids around with the big waves, but the power of those waves is to strong to understand if you were not there

There is another factor here.....the difference with waves that are 20 or 30 feet high that come into pipeline on the north shore of Hawaii is that the wave is high, but not deep (front to back) It is a narrow peak, looking at it from the side.

The difference with a large tsunami is that the water level behind the wall of water is higher than the water level in front of the wave....it is as if the water is moving in a block, rather than a very large ripple, which is what the average Hawaiin wave is. If you look at a Tsunami from the side, it would look more like a step up, than a narrow peak. This is why the water just keeps moving inland like a sudden flood, as apposed to just breaking on the shore like a normal wave.

Ahhh nice post.

Wow knarly currents!