Earthquake disaster today is going worst. There are many earthquake disaster that happen iin the world, suvh as japan, and other caountry. Tsunamis like that caused by the Samoa earthquake are among nature’s most lethal disasters. We look at some of the worst.
• The highest recorded wave in history took place in 1958 in Alaska. A large (magnitude 7.9) earthquake caused 30 million cubic metres of rock to fall into Lituya Bay.
This created a wave that reached 1,720ft tall; more than twice the height of the Canary Wharf Tower. Only two deaths were recorded, as it took place in a sparsely populated area.
• Three and a half billion years ago, an asteroid is believed to have crashed somewhere into the oceans. The impact caused a tsunami so huge that it swept all the way around the world several times, killing all surface life and flooding all land except the highest mountains.
It would have travelled fast enough to make it all the way around the world in just 30 hours.
• The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami was caused by the second largest earthquake ever recorded – between magnitude 9.1 and 9.3, or more than twice the amount of energy as all the explosives used in the Second World War, including the atomic bombs.
The quake caused the seabed to rise several metres. The death toll is estimated at 230,000 people, the single most devastating tsunami in history. Deaths were recorded in South Africa, almost 5,000 miles from the epicentre, and in places the wave reached two miles inland.
• In 1883, a volcano on the island of Krakatoa, between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia, exploded. The explosion, 13,000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb, blasted approximately five cubic miles of rock and ash into the air, causing the average global temperature to drop by as much as 1.2C.
The resulting tsunamis, caused by the explosion and by superheated rivers of gas and rock called ‘pyroclastic flows’ rushing into the ocean, accounted for the bulk of the official 36,417 death toll. Ships as distant as South Africa, 4,700 miles away, were rocked by the wave.
• The 1755 Lisbon earthquake caused the most lethal tsunami ever in the Atlantic ocean. The quake, the fires and waves together caused the deaths of at least 60,000 people in Portugal and Spain, and wrecked sea ports on the coast of north Africa.
The devastation caused the philosopher Voltaire to write his great work Candide, a satirical work asking how God can be benevolent and yet permit such horror.
Subscribe to my feed