pix o’ the day: wall of water

tsunami boat 

Surfing randomly for a photo of a mother for some other blogging project, I was floored to come across the Tsunami blog, which is a record of the Boxing Day Tsunami in Thailand. The picture pages (20!) are astonishing. Unfortunately, the page is copy-protected and I can’t post image links, you’ll just have to follow the text link. The images here are authentic, but from other sites.

Yes, some of the images are hard to look at, but some of them more than make up for that, like picture number one on the Tsunami blog, which shows the tsunami approaching like a blue wall crested with clouds, and a Swedish mother running straight towards it, into the surf to save her children.

They all made it.

While you’re there, check out the images of the 2002 Chinese tidal bore. Some of these were circulated in 2006 as “tsunami pictures” but they are actually old photos of a rare occurrence where a river encounters an unusally strong incoming tide and the result is a tsunami-like wall of water that travels rapidly upriver. Apparently, it’s an annual occurance in that Chinese city and people just love it; they hang around the riverbanks and when it comes roaring their way they go all Running of the Bulls, giggling and jogging out of reach.

You know, I really hope they get cable in China soon, and free up the internet, because these people are obviously STARVED for entertainment.

tidal bore wave

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2 thoughts on “pix o’ the day: wall of water

  1. Hello. Such an infrequent visitor, don’t know why. Yes, we have one of those bores over here that runs along the River Severn. We do already have interwebbery and it appears to just get more people interested. It does attract rather a lot of surfers but sadly there hasn’t yet been a major disaster. We keep our fingers crossed.

  2. If you’re looking for more info on the Boxing Day Tsunami and its aftermath, one of my good friends has been working in Banda Aceh quite a lot developing databases for the aid effort there. He has a blog on his exploits in various hotspots that you might find interesting. http://www.fromthehorizon.com

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