- WARNING – GRAPHIC CONTENT
For ten straight minutes, the entire planet shook violently, sending seismic waves across itself that changed the world for the worse.
In the wake of the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, caused by the third most powerful earthquake ever recorded, countless images of piled up dead bodies, partially rotted from their time floating in blackened seawater, from far-flung lands splashed newspapers and led the evening news across the world.
While much of the world was safe from one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history, much of Asia, which suffered 180,000 confirmed deaths, is still reeling from its impact to this day.
The epicentre of the earthquake that triggered the tsunami, one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history, was just 100 miles off the coast of Indonesia. The massive Indian Plate slide around 50ft under the Burma Plate just before 8am local time on December 26 2004. In two phases, with just 100 seconds between them, the rupture travelled across the Earth at a speed of 6,260mph, starting off the coast of Indonesia, and travelling up the fault line between the two plates towards the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
The quake, with an estimated magnitude of 9.25, making it the third most powerful earthquake ever recorded, displaced more than seven cubic miles of water in a matter of minutes, triggering the tsunami. Violent, deadly waves nearly 100ft high radiated outward from the epicentre. At its fastest, in the deep waters of the Indian Ocean, it travelled up to 620mph.
As the waves reached the shores of more than a dozen countries across two continents, the shallow coastal waters slowed the waves down massively, but in doing so formed destructive waves. By one estimate, these waves carried twice as much energy than all of the explosives used during WWII, including the two atomic bombs.
Indonesian locals at the time looked on in horror as the ‘black giant’ crashed through the city of Banda Aceh. More than 130,000 people here were killed, making up the vast majority of the deaths caused by the tsunami.
Also hit were Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Somalia, Myanmar, the Maldives, Malaysia, Tanzania, the Seychelles, Bangladesh, South Africa, Yemen, Kenya and Madagascar. Twenty years on, the scars of the disaster run deep in the minds of citizens of each of these countries.
