The Day the Earth Shook: The Sumatra–Andaman Earthquake 2004
At 00.58 GMT (7.58 local time) on Sunday, 26 December 2004 a massive earthquake occurred off the north-west coast of Sumatra. The earthquake measured between magnitude 9.0 and 9.3 on the Richter scale with its epicentre at 3.32oN, 95.85oE, and occurred at a depth of approximately 30 kilometres. It was the second largest earthquake recorded since instrumental records began and was the deadliest natural disaster in recorded history. The earthquake and the resulting tsunami are estimated to have killed at least 228,000 people across fifteen countries bordering the Indian Ocean. The worst affected countries were Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Burma, the Maldives, and Somalia. The earthquake occurred on the subduction zone interface between the down-going Indian Ocean plate and the overriding Burma–Andaman–Sumatra plate. It ruptured approximately 1600 kilometres’ length of the plate boundary from Sumatra all the way north to the Burmese coast, travelling at 2–3 kilometres per second. Aftershocks continued unrelentingly for over four months after the earthquake, several reaching magnitude 7.5 as far north as the northern Andaman Islands. The seismic waves indicated a thrust fault earthquake that tilted the surface up to the south-west and down to the north-east. The ground surface was elevated as much as 11 metres at the epicentre, with the tilted surface sinking up to one metre further to the north-east, offshore Sumatra. During the rupture, the Burma plate slipped as much as 15 metres horizontally as the Indian Ocean plate slipped beneath. The force of the quake perceptibly shifted the Earth’s axis, raised sea level globally and speeded Earth’s rotation. It has been suggested that the earthquake shortened the length of the day by 2.68 microseconds, because of the decrease in oblateness of the Earth. The earthquake caused the Earth to wobble on its axis by up to 2.5 cm in the direction of 145o east longitude. The natural ‘Chandler wobble’, a small motion in the Earth’s axis of rotation (the motion that occurs when the spinning object is not a perfect sphere) can be up to 9 metres over 433 days, so this eventually offsets the comparatively minor wobble produced by the earthquake.