Four years ago today I was kayaking off Koh Samet. The tour boat had dropped me the southern end of the island and I paddled to a distant island. It was deserted and I was dehydrated by the time I returned to the hotel. Ordering a beer was impossible, because everyone in the bar was watching horrific footage of the Boxing Day tsunami.
I immediately recognized the images from Koh Phi Phi. Even grimmer VDOs were aired from Indonesia, Phuket, and Sri Lanka. We later learned the death totals numbered in the hundreds of thousands, including the grandson of the Thai King.
Nations mourned this disaster.
For days afterwards friends emailed about my welfare.
“I’m fine.”
Few possessed a good sense of geography.
Koh Samet is on the Gulf of Siam and at the time of the great waves I was peacefully floating on a plastic plank, thinking what a wonderful world we live in.
And it was and will be.
A moment of silence as the world remembers the day when the Earth rang like a bell.
Here’s the equation for the force of a wave.
P=pgh
where
P = the overlying pressure in Newtons per metre square,
ρ = the density of the seawater= 1.1 x 103 kg/m3,
g = the acceleration due to gravity= 9.8 m/s2 and
h = the height of the water column in metres.
Hence for a water column of 5,000 m depth the overlying pressure is equal to 5.7 Million tonnes per metre square.
In other words ‘run for your life’.