What
the Tsunami Disaster Leads us to Consider
The South Asian earthquake
of 26 December 2004, the largest in the last 40 years and
fifth largest since 1900, registering 9 on the Richter scale,
and the tsunami that followed it, caused a disaster leading
to the deaths of more than 156,000 people. 1,000 square-kilometre
faults that appeared as the result of the movement of great
underground plates and the enormous energy created by land
masses changing place combined with the great energy occurring
in the oceans to create tsunamis. The tsunamis struck the
South Asian countries of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia,
Thailand, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Maldives and the Seychelles,
and even the coast of the African country of Somalia, some
5,000 kilometres away.
The word “tsunami,” meaning harbour wave
in Japanese, became part of the languages of the world in
the aftermath of the 15 June, 1896, Great Meiji Tsunami
that hit Japan and in which 21,000 people lost their lives.
In order to understand the tsunami, it
is most important to distinguish the tsunami from tides
and waves formed by the wind. Winds blowing over the surface
of the ocean set up a current limited to the upper layer
of the sea by raising relatively small waves. For example;
divers with air-bottles can easily dive down and reach still
water. There may be waves of 30 metres or more in violent
storms, but these do not set the deep waters in motion.
In addition, the speed of a normal wind wave is up to 20
km/hour, while one feature of the tsunami wave is that it
travels at 750-800 km/hour. The tides move over the Earth
twice in the course of a day and, just like tsunamis, can
produce currents that reach down to the sea bed. In contrast
to genuine tidal waves, however, the source of tsunamis
is not the gravitational force of the Moon and Sun.
The tsunami represents a long-period sea
wave that forms due to energy passing into the sea because
of earthquakes, volcanic explosions and strata collapses
connected to these in the ocean or sea bed, tectonic events
such as underwater plate slides, or meteor effects. When
the ocean floor changes place at high speed, the whole mass
of water above it is affected. What happens in the sea floor
is reflected on the surface of the water, and the whole
mass of water, down to a depth of 5,000-6,000 metres, joins
in the wave motion. Consecutive swelling and falling may
cover an area of up to 10,000 square kilometres.
Tsunamis Have No Effect
in Open Seas
In the open ocean, tsunamis are not the
enormous walls of water that most people would imagine;
they are generally less than 1 metre high, with a wave length
of around 1,000 kilometres. As can be seen from this, the
wave surface is very slightly inclined (1 cm in 1 km). In
deep and open ocean regions, these waves go unperceived,
despite moving at the high speed of 500 to 800 km/hour,
since they are masked by normal surface waves. In order
to better comprehend the speed of the wave, we may say that
it could compete with that of a Boeing 747 jet. A tsunami
that takes place in the open sea will not even be felt by
any vessels.
Tsunamis Depositing
100,000 Tons of Water on Land
Research has shown that rather than consisting
of a single wave, tsunamis actually consist of a series
of waves with a single centre, like a stone thrown into
a swimming pool. The distance between two consecutive waves
may be 500-650 kilometres. This means the tsunami can cross
the ocean in a matter of hours. The tsunami only reveals
its enormous energy when it approaches the shore. Energy
distributed in a thick column of water becomes concentrated
as that column increasingly contracts and a rapid increase
in the height of the surface wave can be observed. Waves
less than 60 cm high in open ocean waters lose speed as
they approach shallow waters, the distance between the waves
decreases, and waves piling on top of others create the
tsunami by forming a wall of water. These giant waves, that
are generally 15 metres high and rarely exceed 30 metres,
use enormous force against the shore they strike with great
speed, inflict serious damage, and cause considerable loss
of life.
The tsunami deposits more than 100,000
tons of water for every metre of shoreline, with a hard-to-imagine
destructive force. (The tsunami that struck Japan in July,
1993, the largest known tsunami ever, rose 30 metres above
sea level.) The first sign that a tsunami is approaching
is usually not a wall of water, but the sudden retreat of
the sea.
Major Tsunamis in
History
The greatest recorded giant sea waves caused
by earthquakes are listed as follows:
The oldest known giant marine earthquake
wave, called “tsunami” by the Japanese and “hungtao” by
the Chinese, is that which took place in the eastern Mediterranean
on 21 July, 365 AD and killed thousands
of people in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.
The Portuguese capital was destroyed in
the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1 November, 1775. The Atlantic
ocean wave, 6 metres high, devastated the Portuguese, Spanish
and Moroccan coasts.
27 August 1883: The Indonesian
volcano Krakatoa erupted, and the tsunami that washed over
the Javan and Sumatran coasts killed 36,000 people. The
volcanic eruption was so powerful that for many nights the
sky shone with red lava dust.
15 June 1896: The “Sanriku
Tsunami” struck Japan. The 23 metre high giant tsunami that
swept over masses of people gathered together for a religious
festival cost the lives of 26,000 people.
17 December 1896: A tsunami
destroyed part of the embankment of Santa Barbara in California,
USA, and the main boulevard was flooded.
31 January 1906: The Pacific
Ocean earthquake wave destroyed part of the city of Tumaco
in Colombia, as well as all the houses on the coast between
Rioverde in Ecuador and Micay in Colombia; 1,500 people
died.
1 April 1946: The tsunami
that destroyed the Aleutian Scotch Cap Lighthouse with its
crew of five, proceeded to Hilo in Hawaii, killing 159 people.
22 May 1960: An 11-metre
high tsunami killed 1,000 people in Chile and 61 in Hawaii.
The giant wave crossed to the opposite shore of the Pacific
Ocean and rocked the Philippines and the Japanese island
of Okinawa.
28 March 1964: The Alaskan
“Good Friday” tsunami wiped three villages off the map with
107 people dead, and 15 in Oregon and California.
16 August 1976: A Pacific
tsunami cost the lives of 5,000 people in the Moro Gulf
in the Philippines.
17 July 1998: A tremor
wave occurring in northern Papua New Guinea killed 2,313
people, destroyed 7 villages and left thousands homeless.
26 December 2004: The
8.9 earthquake and giant wave that struck six countries
in South-east Asia killed more than 156,000 people.
Factors Increasing the
Violence of Tsunamis
According to information provided by Dr.
Walter C. Dudley, a professor of oceanography and the cofounder
of the Pacific Tsunami Museum, no matter what the force
of the earthquake, movement on the sea floor is necessary
for a tsunami to appear. In other words, the greater the
dislocation in the sea floor, the greater the mass of water
it will set in motion, and this will increase the violence
of the tsunami. Another factor increasing tsunami force
is the structure of the coast it strikes: In addition to
factors such as that coast being a gulf or cape, flat or
inclined, the structure of that part of the coast that remains
under water may increase the violence of killer waves.
In another statement, in which he made
it clear that the precautions taken could not represent
a definitive solution, Dudley said that America and Japan
had established very advanced monitoring systems in the
Pacific Ocean, but that all these systems had a false alarm
rate of fifty percent!
Signs of the End
Times
Natural disasters, which cannot be prevented
even with technological means or precautionary measures,
show just how helpless mankind truly is.
From the 20th century, characterised
as the “century of disasters,” up to the present, there
have been catastrophes such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions,
tornados, storms, typhoons, whirlwinds and floods, in addition
to tsunamis, and these have inflicted terrible damage and
cost the lives of millions of people. When one thinks about
these extraordinary phenomena, it can clearly be seen that
they bear a close similarity to the natural phenomena revealed
as indicating the first period of the End Times.
According to what is revealed in the hadiths,
the End Times is a period that will come about close to
doomsday, and when the moral values of the Qur’an will be
widespread among people. The first period of the End Times
will be one when people will draw away from religious moral
values, when wars will increase, and extraordinary natural
phenomena will be experienced.
Indeed, in the hadiths eradicated cities
and peoples wiped from the pages of history are reported
as signs of the End Times. In those hadiths dealing with
the matter, our Prophet states:
“The Hour (Last Day) will not be
established until ... earthquakes will be very frequent.”
(Bukhari)
"Big phenomena will happen in
his time." (Ibn Hajar Haytahami, Al-Qawl al-Mukhtasar
fi'alamat al-Mahdi al-Muntazar, p. 27)
There are two great hadiths before
the day of Judgment ... and then years of earthquakes.
(Narrated by Umm Salama (r.a.))
"So many appalling incidents
will occur in his time." (Imam Rabbani, Letters of
Rabbani, 2/258)
In the second period of the End Times,
God will free people from degeneration and war by means
of the Mahdi. At this time, known as the Golden Age, war
and conflict will come to an end, the world will be filled
with plenty, abundance and justice, and Islamic moral values
will prevail on Earth and will be widely practiced. No such
period has ever taken place before but, by God’s leave,
one will be experienced before doomsday. It is now awaiting
the time appointed by God.
Everything is under the control
of God. Believers who know this truth and who have sincere
faith in God submit to our Lord in the knowledge that they
are following their destiny. God has flawlessly arranged
everything, down to the very finest detail, from the creation
of the Earth up to the Day of Judgment. Everything is recorded
in the book “Lawh-i Mahfuz.” Everything has already taken
place in a single instant in the sight of God, Who is not
bound by time or space, and the time and place of every
event has been determined. This fact is expressed thus in
a verse: “Every communication has its time, and
you will certainly come to know.” (Qur’an, 6:67)
