Tsunami Hits Samoa
It is truly sad to witness a series of unfortunate events. These calamities can only be cause by nature and by humans. Just this week Philippines lost hundreds of people due to its heavy typhoon. Homes and families suffered from the typhoon. Although a lot of people, organizations and celebrities joined forces to help those who need food, clothes and water. Yesterday melancholic news hit the stands, the tsunami that hit Samao.
From Nat geo news:
September 30, 2009–A building lies in ruins in the village of Leone, American Samoa, yesterday after a tsunami swept over the South Pacific Island. The tsunami had been triggered by a magnitude 8.3 earthquake that struck around 6:40 a.m. local time
Tsunami waves–some reportedly 15 feet (4.5 meters) tall–flattened villages and killed scores of people in American Samoa, a U.S. territory, and the independent island nation of Samoa (At least 34 and up to 120 people are feared dead across Samoa so far. Some tsunami-related deaths have also been reported on the neighboring islands of Tonga, according to the BBC.
A massive, magnitude 8.0 undersea earthquake south of Samoa and American Samoa sparked today’s tsunami, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
A tsunami is a series of great sea waves caused by an underwater earthquake, landslide, or volcanic eruption. More rarely, a tsunami can be generated by a giant meteor impact with the ocean.
Scientists have found traces of an asteroid-collision event that they say would have created a giant tsunami that swept around the Earth several times, inundating everything except the tallest mountains 3.5 billion years ago. The coastline of the continents was changed drastically and almost all life on land was exterminated.
• An earthquake generates a tsunami if it is of sufficient force and there is a violent enough movement of the seafloor to cause substantial and sudden displacement of a massive amount of water.
• Tsunami (pronounced soo-NAH-mee) is a Japanese word, and in fact tsunamis are fairly common in Japan. Many thousands of Japanese have been killed by them in recent centuries.
Scientists say that a great earthquake of magnitude 9 struck the Pacific Northwest in 1700 and created a tsunami that caused flooding and damage on the Pacific coast of Japan.
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