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New discovery on the tsunami
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A programme tries to understand last year's catastrophe
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DEADLY WAVE The wave was three miles deep
Watch out for the programme Unstoppable Wave on Discovery Channel this Sunday and Monday for some groundbreaking television.
The channel co-funded an expedition of top scientists to explore the seabed site of the Asian tsunami — the first ever attempt to understand the causes of last year's tsunami. An international team of 27 scientists, including an Indian, spent 17 days at sea exploring the seafloor off the coast of Sumatra. The team of seismologists, geophysicists, biologists and seabed visualisation experts and seabed modellers have revealed new evidence that the sea-floor uplift from the 9.2 magnitude Great Sumatra Earthquake, and not a giant underwater landslide as previously thought, caused the devastating December 26 tsunami. The quake was the third largest ever recorded and the largest to strike in more than 40 years; it brought in waves sometimes up to 120 feet high.
The programme promises to reveal the first images of the epicentre that caused the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. It also promises "breathtaking photo-real CGI" that will for the first time accurately reveal the sequence of events and take viewers deep into the abyss to see the wave as it would have raced across the Indian Ocean at speeds exceeding 500 miles per hour — a wave only 20 inches high but nearly three miles deep.
Unstoppable Wave premiers on December 25 at 8 p.m. with a repeat on December 26 at 8 p.m.
Indian on board
Baban Ingole, a marine biologist with the National Institute of Oceonography in Goa, is the Indian member of the expedition team. He has been associated with the Institute for the past 24 years and he has worked on varied ocean habitats and phenomena like estuaries, salt marshes, inter-tidal expansions, coral reefs and deep seas of the Antarctic Ocean. He has also participated in three Indian Antarctic expeditions.
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