Probably a very dumb question but did the waves only go northish with this thing or was something felt on the Australian coast. I was thinking about whether or not Ellen Macarthur or the Vendee fleet might have felt the effects of it. I suppose they are beyond its reach?
I think that if you are in deep water you won't even notice it as it is a pure wave motion with no 'sideways' forces associated with it. It is also likely to only be a foot or so high and with a long wavelength. It is only when the wave hits shallow water that it becomes dangerous.
I see the Scotsman today has an article calling for an early warning system for the Atlantic. If the predicted Las Palmas volcanic landslip happened the S. Coast could expect 30ft waves.
Apparantly 20cm was recorded on NZ's western coastline - that is if the news media reported it correctly, which is always a worry. We live right on that coast and, of course, did not notice a thing.
As far as I know tsunamis are not noticable by normal means from a boat in deep water.
The waves will go out in a circle from the epicentre, same as the ripples from a stone dropped in a pond. Only a rough circle though, as the epicentre was a long line, not a point. Ellen is in deep water, so effects would be minimal - she's probably not totally beyond it's reach, as even African shore line has been affected
Assume that as the epicentre was off the northern tip of Sumatra, anything further to the south ie Australia was effectively in the 'shadow' of Sumatra and therefore didn't experience the same effect?
CNN TV showed a video clip of the wave pattern flowing across the Indian Ocean, it had enough random features to indicate it was taken from space i.e. not a computer model.
The wave pattern was not regular or circular. The strongest wave front was linear and moved due west.
I would suggest that the Scotsman had a good point
There is a fault line runs roughly N-S down the Atlantic and a history of volcanic activity from Iceland southwards.
Also worth mentioning that the Eastern Atlantic is well monitored by sonar sensors so a warning system should be relatively easy to set up.
Exactly what one would do if there was a warning is another matter. Thinking back to the floods of 2000 in my area, the performance of local authority emergency planners was not impressive, how they would cope with something on this scale is anybodies guess.
Deep water sailors would not typically notice any effect from a tsunami. Though I am sure that I did once observe a very strange shaped swell while crossing the N. Pacific some years back, but no solid proof there.
Has been confirmed by the marine sciences people here that the remnants of the tsunami were recorded on NZ's western coastline tidal gauges and varied between 10 and 30 cm. They say the tsunami had to travel around 8,000km to get here and did so in 17 hours (470 kilometers per hour).
There is a well established tsunami warning system in the Pacific Ocean and many are now jumping in and saying the same should be set up for the Indian Ocean. However, scientists here are saying that would not be of much use as the Indian Ocean is too small - the most warning that could be gotten would be a couple of hours which is not long enough to get warnings out to people and evacuate. I suspect that would also be so for other vulnerable areas such as the Med.
Whereas in the Pacific the distances are large enough for countries well away to get useful warning. Even as a child (many moons ago and we lived on the coast) I can remember us being taught what the town's warning siren signal was. Today, inside cover of every copy of the telephone yellow pages is a "what do do" if there is a tsunami warning. In my lifetime here I have only experienced one tsunami warning, and while the effects were observable it was a "fizzer" luckily.
Thailand Tsunamis
Linear Mode
