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Other Tsunami Materials

These materials and URLs were submitted by faculty in response to a request we sent out viw the web and the Geo-Ed listserv. Click here to return to the Tsunami Visualization Collection.


Clearinghouse Sites | Audio/Visual | Class Pages and Educational Materials | Outreach Activities | Research and Data

Clearinghouse Sites

Tsunami (more info) !: This site is done by the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Washington. It provides a wide array of information about tsunamis. Areas addressed include:


Windows on the Universe (more info) : Windows on the Universe is a very large Earth and Space Science website serving the educational community and the general public. They have a series of pages on tsunamis that starts at http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/headline_universe/earth_science/stories_2004/tsunami_news.html.

SpiNet: This site contains seismograms from school-based stations, articles and contributions from teachers who operate seismic stations in the classrooms, as well as links and other information.

Wikipedia: 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake (more info) : This page at Wikipedia is a community-developed clearinghouse for very extensive information on the earthquake and tsunami. There are tons of links, both internal and external to Wikipedia. They also provide access to news reports, pictures, videos, animations, scientific and government reports, as well as aid group sites.


Audio/Visual

Tsunami Computer Movies: This is a collection of tsunami animations by Dr. Charles L. Mader performed using the SWAN code described in the monograph "Numerical Modeling of Water Waves," published in 1988 by University of California Press. There are a sizeable number of movies available on this page ranging from models of the 1755 Lisbon Tsunami to the 1960 Chile Tsunami and its effects throughout the Pacific Ocean region. The animations have to be downloaded as a zip file and unpacked before they can be viewed.

Amateur Tsunami Video Footage: This site holds a large collection of video footage shot by amateur videographers during the 12/26/04 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

The Earth: A Living Planet - Tsunami: This page from the Seed Project contains information on the Indian Ocean Tsunami as well as 2 new visualizations. THe first shows the main wave's progress across the ocean in hour increments. The second shows a hypothetical tsunami in profile as it travels across open water and then encounters a land mass. (Both of these links are images on the right hand side of the page.)

Cheese and Crackers: Tsunami Videos: This weblog has an extensive collection of video from the tsunami.

Asias Deadly Waves: This interactive multimedia site was done by the New York Times. There are pictures, animations and close-ups of the effects of the tsunami. This site is Flash driven.

2004 Asian Tsunamis: A Look Back: This news station site has a collection of video clips that were shot by amateur photgraphers. The site requires Windows (98, NT, 2000, XP, or ME), Internet Explorer, and Flash (5.0) or Windows Media Player (7.1).

Wave of Destruction: This site has extensive photo and video footage of the tsunami, most of it from amateur photographers in the affected areas at the time.

Landsat 7 Images Show Scale of Tsunami Damage: This NASA page shows before and after pictures taken by Landsat 7's Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) instrument of a part of the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The images show that the scale of the tsunami's impact can be seen from space.

Spot Image - Asia Tsunami: This site provides satellite imagry of some of the affected areas, highlighting the effects of the tsunami.

Banda Aceh Pictures: This is a page of images of the devestation in Banda Aceh taken by two medical doctors in the region helping with the relief effort (Dr. Eric Rasmussen, MD, US Navy and Dr. Dave Warner, MD, Ph.D.). Most of the pictures were taken a mile or more from the coast.

Earthquake and Tsunami in Southern Asia: This page is part of the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters. They are providing before and after satellite imagry of affected areas.

Satellite Images of Tsunami Affected Areas: The satellite images of the Tsunami affected areas in this web page were acquired by the Centre for Remote Imaging, Sensing and Processing at the National University of Singapore. They show the effects of the tsunamis on the affected areas in Indonesia, Thailand and island of India.

Environcast Media: This site provide high-resolution images of coastal areas in Thailand that were affected by the tsunami.


Class Pages and Educational Materials

Introduction to Oceanography: This class schedule, submitted by Dr. Robert Stewart of Texas A & M University, lays out the topics of discussion by day of class. One of the first days is devoted to a problem-based learning module where the students download information about the 12/26/04 tsunami from the web and forming opinions about what happened and why. The next day is devoted to the relationships between earthquakes, geologic setting and tsunamis as well as early warning systems.

Continuity and Catastrophy: This page is part of a site for the class The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: Exploring the Significance of Diversity taught by Paul Grobstein at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. In one section of the class, Dr. Grobstein uses the 12/26/04 tsunami as a take off point for a broad consideration of how humans make sense of "catastrophes" and how ways of doing so have changed over time. The page includes notes for the section and links to information that the students will need.

GSC 350: Natural Disasters: This page contains lecture notes from Dr. Jeff Marshall in the Geological Science Department at Cal Poly Pomona University. This subset of his classnotes for the Natural Disasters class deals with the Indian Ocean earthquake, tsunami and the aftermath of the disaster. The page also includes links that he has collected to items of interest.

Earth Science-Tsunami Tracker: This page was put together by Middle School Earth Science teacher Laurie Haddock as a tool for her students to conduct interactive web research to learn about tsunamis. This page is a part of the TrackStar site.

2004 Asian Earthquake and Tsunami Disaster Project: This class activity by High School teacher Char Bezanson is a Project-Based-Learning unit that involves a research jigsaw. The scenario is that students are employees of a unit of the United Nations that will be helping with tsunami relief. The expert groups research the tsunami from various perspectives (geology, medicine, politics, economics), share what they find, and then are reassigned to groups based on an affected country.


Outreach Activities

Surviving A Tsunami - Lessons from Chile, Hawaii, and Japan (more info) : This US Geological Survey circular was compiled in 1999. There are many still photos from the 1960 tsunami that hit Chile, Hawaii, and Japan. The object of the circular is to disseminate lessons learned for surviving an earthquake and tsunami. There is also a PDF of the report (15.7 Mb).


International Tsunami Information Center: This intergovernmental organization maintains and develops relationships with scientific research and academic organizations, civil defense agencies, and the general public in order to mitigate the hazards associated with tsunamis for all Pacific Ocean nations. They also maintain the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

NOAA SCIENTISTS ABLE TO MEASURE TSUNAMI HEIGHT FROM SPACE: This news release from NOAA explains how scientists were able to use satellite measurements to calculate the hight of the tsunami waves at several times during the tsunami's progress throughout the region.

Reliefweb: This site provides disaster information to and about charities working around the world. They provide a large amount of data on deaths, injuries, damage, etc. all correlated on maps of affected areas.

Tsunami: A special Report on the Asian Tsunami Disaster: This site (created by Justin Sharpe, a teacher at Beal High School, Ilford, Essex. UK) grew out of a series of presentations the creator has been giving to assemblies of 11-17 year olds in a high school setting.

Supercourse - Epidemiology, the Internet and Human Health (more info) : This group is developing a library of Just-In-Time Lectures written by faculty across the globe that are freely available to the rest of the world as a way of bringing more high quality information into classrooms. They have two lectures related to the earthquake and tsunmai in Southeast Asia.


Research and Data

Dr. Steven Ward, University of California - Santa Cruz: Dr. Ward has an extensive site of information on tsunamis. There are simulations and papers. Some highlights include:


International Tsunami Symposium: This site contains papers and abstracts from the International Tsunami Symposium 2001 and the U.S. National Tsunami Mitigation Program Review, held in Seattle, Washington, on 7–10 August 2001.


PMEL Tsunami Research Program: Ths program seeks to mitigate tsunami hazards to Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska. Research and development activities focus on an integrated approach to improving tsunami warning and mitigation.

National Earthquake Information Center (more info) : The mission NEIC is to rapidly determine location and size of all destructive earthquakes worldwide and to immediately disseminate this information to concerned national and international agencies, scientists, and the general public.

USGS Earthquakes Hazard Program - SUMATRA-ANDAMAN ISLANDS EARTHQUAKE: This page summarizes USGS data on the 9.0 earthquake that spawned the 12/26/04 tsunami.

Tsunami Laboratory at the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics of the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This group conducts ongoing research into tsunamis and maitains databases of historical Pacific, Atlantic and Mediterranean tsunamis dating from antiquity to the present. Versions of these databases are available online.

The Sumatra-Andaman Islands Earthquake: This site by Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (more info) (IRIS) provides figures, graphs, and other information about the mega-thrust earthquake that gave rise the the tsunami in South and Southeast Asia.

Tsunami Research Center at USC: This group is involved with all aspects of tsunami research; field surveys, numerical and analytical modeling, as well as hazard mitigation and planning.

UNAVCO, Inc.: UNAVCO has summarized preliminary scientific analyses (GPS) of the recent Mw 9.0 earthquake in a brief webpage. There is also a link to the web forum.

CGIAR Consortium for Spatial Information: This site is providing links to geospatial resources (GIS and RS) relevant to tsunami affected areas.

ZKI: This group, in partnership with other international agencies and associated with the German Aerospace Center DLR, has taken over responsibility for the acquisition of satellite data, the generation of image maps, and their dissemination to various relief organisations via the Internet.

DM Solutions Group: This site contains a wealth of data about all Indian Basin Tsunami affected countries and regions – collected both before and after the ongoing disaster. The goal of the site is to help facilitate, through the use of interactive Web-mapping technology, all aspects of disaster mitigation.

AGU Highlights: Tsunami
This collection of tsunami-related AGU Press Releases and Highlights from 1996 to 10 April 2006 can be used to teach science with the news.



Clearinghouse Sites | Audio/Visual | Class Pages and Educational Materials | Outreach Activities | Research and Data