"Boxing day Tsunami"
On Sunday, December 26, 2004 The Boxing Day tsunami caused by the Indian plate going beneath the Burma plate would cause the deadliest in recorded history, taking around 230,000 lives in a matter of hours. USGS estimated the earthquake released the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. The resulting tsunami spread across the Indian Ocean and devastated the shores of Indonesia, south Asia, eastern Africa, and Madagascar with waves up to 100 feet high. Because at that time there were no tide gauges, wave sensors or modeling systems in place for the Indian Ocean, or a coordinated tsunami communications system, most areas in the region were hit by the waves without any warning. The city of Banda Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra was closest to the earthquake when it started and the first waves arrived in just 20 minutes. Thailand was next. With waves traveling 500 mph across the Indian Ocean, the tsunami hit the coastal provinces of Phang Nga and Phuket an hour and a half later. Even though at this time they were warned, nobody understood the true danger that this tsunami was coming with and even if they did, there wasnt much they could do about it. The death toll in Thailand was nearly 5,400 including 2,000 foreign tourists. An hour later, on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean, the waves struck the southeastern coast of India near the city of Chennai, killing more than 10,000 people, mostly women and children, since many of the men were out fishing. But some of the worst devastation happened in Sri Lanka, where more than 30,000 people were swept away by the waves and hundreds of thousands left homeless. What caused the boxing day tsunami was A magnitude 9.3 earthquake that occurred on the seafloor off the western coast of Sumatra. It ruptured over a 1200km section of a fault under the sea, causing a huge area of the sea floor to be raised . This caused many hundreds of cubic kilometres of sea water to be lifted above its normal level. It spread out as a tsunami. In other words, this was caused by a convergent boundary.