Indonesia Earthquake/Tsunami Mystery: What might saved us in 2012..??

JAKARTA, Indonesia (Thu, Apr 12) – Indonesians consider themselves very lucky not to suffer a tsunami as massive as they faced in 2004, after Wednesday’s severe 8.7-magnitude earthquake in Aceh province (read more HERE).

Emile Okal, a geophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, analyzed the possible good reasons that apparently averted a possible natural disaster that could take hundreds of thousands of lives.

"There was a tsunami, but the waves were just below 1 meter [3.3 feet]," said Emile Okal. "That is significant, but it's not going to do much damage."

The latest phenomenon was an absolute contrast to the December 2004 tsunami, when gigantic waves reached heights of nearly ten stories, thus killed more than 170,000 people.

According to Okal; there might be two major possible reasons that latest undersea earthquake off Indonesia did not produce a colossal tsunami, discussed below:

1. The quake was of a relatively smaller magnitude, i.e. 8.7 on Richter scale, against 9.3-magnitude quake that struck off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, in 2004.
2. The recent earthquake was less disastrous because it was a strike-slip quake, where the motion is primarily side-to-side, like two ships sideswiping each other. In the 2004 quake, huge crest of the seafloor force sharply upward, severely disturbing the water level on the surface.

On Wednesday "the amplitude of the tsunami was less than what it would have been had it involved more vertical motion," Okal concluded.

For further detailed reading:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/04/120411-tsunami-alert-watch-warning-earthquake-indonesia-aceh-science-/