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Australia placed on tsunami alert.

DeSnousa

DeSnousa

macrumors 68000
Original poster
I hope it's not going to be as serious as they are predicting 🙁

A TSUNAMI warning has been issued for the entire east coast of Australia after a strong earthquake near the Solomon Islands.

Residents on Queensland's Barrier Reef Islands and Willis Island in the Coral Sea were first placed on alert today and told to leave low-lying areas.

But the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has now extended the tsunami warning to Norfolk Island and Lord Howe Island and the whole eastern coast as far south as Tasmania.
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Link to full article
 
just heard on tv (today show). meteorologists say that it will only be 20cm high and not very serious.
 
what exactly would a tsunami warning mean? is evacuation mandatory? and if the wave was serious, where would the residents of these low lying islands even have a place to evacuate to?
 
dmw007 said:
20cm sounds rather harmless.
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My limited understanding is that tsunami are not very high, but they are very wide (deep?) and travel much faster than normal waves.

Hence a normal 4m high storm wave is maybe 3m from front to back, and would crash into the shore then roll back, so but a 2m high tsunami is maybe 500m from front to back, so when it crashes onto the shore, it just keeps on coming and coming all the way inland.

I'm just guessing at my numbers here, and I welcome corrections, but that's my estimate from looking at what happened last year.
 
Was never really a problem for Oz. It's got its best natural defences facing that direction, namely 2000 kilometres of offshore reef.
 
RedTomato said:
My limited understanding is that tsunami are not very high, but they are very wide (deep?) and travel much faster than normal waves.

Hence a normal 4m high storm wave is maybe 3m from front to back, and would crash into the shore then roll back, so but a 2m high tsunami is maybe 500m from front to back, so when it crashes onto the shore, it just keeps on coming and coming all the way inland.

I'm just guessing at my numbers here, and I welcome corrections, but that's my estimate from looking at what happened last year.
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Thanks for the clarification RedTomato. 🙂
 
I'm sure John Howard would put a spin on things and claim that immediately our drought problems are over
 
This was the worse disaster since the rain some people experienced last weekend! They couldn't go to the beach, and had to stay indoors somewhat. 🙁
 
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