Fw: only the tide gauges noticed.

[Guest guest]

- CHEROKEE

Saturday, January 08, 2005 2:03 PM

only the tide gauges noticed.

 

\-------------------------/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/07/international/worldspecial4/07waves.html?ex=1106215496 & ei=1 & en=d092c1839dd30a31Tide Gauges: Tsunami's Ripples, Unnoticed, Washed Along Atlantic CoastJanuary 7, 2005 By ANDREW C. REVKINThe tsunami that ravaged countries all around the IndianOcean also hit the eastern United States, though only thetide gauges noticed.A tide gauge at Atlantic City recorded the passage of a"train" of waves, just under nine inches from crest totrough, 32 hours after the earthquake struck off Sumatra'swest coast on Dec. 26, said Dr. Alexander B. Rabinovich ofthe Canadian Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, BritishColumbia. A gauge at Port Canaveral, Fla., recorded13.4-inch waves 24 minutes later.Dr. Rabinovich has been spearheading an internationaleffort to chart the course of the fading ripples from thedevastating tsunami set off by the earthquake.The tsunami was so powerful that it swept around the worldover the next 36 hours, with its last residual wavesperceptibly jostling tide gauges from Russia's remotenortheastern Pacific waters to the North Atlantic,scientists said yesterday.The tsunami ripples would have been imperceptible toFloridians, mingled among the other sloshing of watersthere, but were clearly discernible in the data, Dr.Rabinovich said. Other Atlantic gauges detected the wavesin Bermuda and the Virgin Islands, he said.The evidence of the tsunami's passage in the Atlantic isparticularly significant, seismologists and oceanographerssaid, because data on how quake-generated waves move thereare scant compared with information available for thePacific.The newly discovered records of the Atlantic waves from theSumatran earthquake should help improve computersimulations of tsunami behavior in the Atlantic, said Dr.Vasily V. Titov, a tsunami expert who works for theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle.Such simulations can help scientists predict where tsunamisgenerated in the Atlantic might strike, he said.The signal of the tsunami's quiet journey once it left theIndian Ocean was detected almost immediately in the PacificOcean, where 90 percent of tsunamis occur and tide gaugesare specifically designed to catch trains of wavesgenerated by underwater earthquakes, scientists said.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/07/international/worldspecial4/07waves.html?