EDITORIAL 

Super vision
Reports of animals' ''sixth sense'' in detecting hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions long before the earth starts shaking date back to centuries. After the Dec. 26 tsunami, a Danish man staying in Ao Sane Beach, north of Phuket, wrote on a Danish Web site: ``Dogs are smarter than all of us. . . . [They] started running away up to the hilltops long before we even realized what was coming.''
In Khao Lak, 50 miles north of Phuket along Thailand's western coast, a dozen elephants giving tourists rides began trumpeting many hours before the Dec. 26 tsunami. An hour before the waves slammed the resort area, the elephants again began wailing. Just before the disaster struck, they headed for higher ground - some breaking their chains to flee. Flamingos that breed this time of year at Point Calimere sanctuary on India's southern coast left for safer forests well before the tsunami hit. At the hard-hit Yala National Park in Sri Lanka, stunned wildlife officials reported that hundreds of elephants, leopards, tigers, wild boar, deer, water buffalo, monkeys and smaller mammals and reptiles had escaped unscathed. And while large turtles have been found dead in the debris along the shore of Indonesia's devastated Aceh province, the tsunami's impact on wildlife was ''limited,'' as reported the conservation group Fauna & Flora International.
These tales are raising anew questions about what the animal kingdom knew that humans didn't. Can we learn anything from them, while seismologists with sophisticated instruments are unable to predict tsunamis? In fact human-made instruments are yet to replicate animals' sensory physiology. 
Super sense
Animals' super-sensitivity to sound, temperature, touch, vibration, electrostatic and chemical activity and magnetic fields -- gives them a head start in the hours before natural calamities, something that we humans don't have. What animals through millions of years of evolution have developed it, we have not been able to achieve even with our super hi-tech precision weapons and information technology. That's how animals have been able to survive as a species. Research shows that many fish are sensitive to low frequency vibrations. The bullhead catfish detects even magnitude-2 weak earthquakes, which people can't feel at the top of 10-story buildings. Elephants are known to 'lay their trunks on the ground when an airplane or truck generates large seismic noise as if to feel it. With the elephant's intelligence -- its brain is the largest of terrestrial creatures -- they can figure out what direction the stimulus is coming from, how strong it is and what evasive action to take.

Super ear
Some animals may have heard the tsunami coming from the moment the quake erupted under the ocean. Species of birds, dogs, elephants, tigers and other animals can detect ''infrasound'' -- frequencies in the range of 1-3 hertz, compared with humans' 100-200-hertz range. It's sensitivity to such a low frequency range that most people wouldn't call it sound. Desmond Morris, animal behavioralist and author of The Naked Ape says cats and dogs are sensitive to sudden electromagnetic changes -- like those that precede an earthquake -- which is why ``many dogs shiver and become scared when a thunderstorm is approaching.''
But the question is why not humans? Because of our physiological limitations? No, perhaps due to our desire not to be in harmony with, but our appetite to conquer and control Nature. 

Super Donor
Meanwhile, as of today, the thesis that aid given after a natural disaster is a pure affirmation of the best of the human spirit, uncontaminated by politics is put to scrutiny. ….
Тим часом світ допомагає потерпілим від цунамі. На цю тему проводяться прес-конференції, скрізь говорять про об'єднання зусиль у боротьбі із наслідками стихійного лиха. До Таїланду надходять листи співчуття, в інтересах потерпілих організовують благодійні заходи та інше. Усе це добре. Це, зрештою, те, що ми уміємо робити. Але ж визнаймо і таке: багато країн постраждалого регіону втрачають кошти платників податків на військові потреби. А ось на попередження таких стихийних лих або на соціальний захист направляються мізерні суми. Звідси запитання: хто кого захищав і від чого? А поки що світ думає над розробкою ще однієї міжнародної ініціативи у рамках дослідження цих явищ та міркує над глобальною системою попередження катклізмів. Цим наше велике бачення і закінчиться. Питання не в тому, чи почнемо ми діяти, а в тому -- чи почнемо ми відчувати? 

Past tsunamis

6100 B.C. and before
In the North Atlantic Ocean, the Storegga Slides were a major series of sudden underwater land movements over the course of tens of thousands of years.
1650 B.C. - Santorini
At some time between 1650 BC and 1600 BC (still debated), the volcanic Greek island Santorini erupted, causing a 100m to 150m high tsunami that devastated the north coast of Crete, 70km (45 miles) away. Santorini is regarded as the most likely source for Plato's literary parable of Atlantis, and is believed by some scientists to have informed Great Flood accounts which were eventually recorded in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts.
January 20, 1607
Bristol Channel thousands of people were drowned, houses and villages swept away, farmland inundated and flocks destroyed. It was commemorated in a contemporary pamphlet "God's warning to the people of England by the great overflowing of the waters or floods." 
1755 - Lisbon, Portugal
Tens of thousands of Portuguese who survived the great 1755 Lisbon earthquake were killed by a tsunami which followed minutes later. Many townspeople fled to the waterfront, believing the area safe from fires and from falling debris from aftershocks. Before the great wall of water hit the harbor, waters retreated, revealing lost cargo and forgotten shipwrecks. The earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent fires killed more than a third of Lisbon's pre-quake population of 275,000. Historical records of explorations by Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus were lost, and countless buildings were destroyed (including most examples of Portugal's Manueline architecture). The destruction of Lisbon sharply checked the colonial ambitions of the Portuguese Empire. Europeans of the 18th century struggled to understand the disaster within religious and rational belief systems. Philosophers of the Enlightenment, notably Voltaire, wrote about the event. The philosophical concept of the sublime, as described by philosopher Immanuel Kant in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, took inspiration in part from attempts to comprehend the enormity of the Lisbon quake and tsunami.
Many animals sensed danger and fled to higher ground before the water arrived. The Lisbon quake is the first documented case of such a phenomenon in Europe. The phenomenon was also noted in Sri Lanka in the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. Some scientists speculate that animals may have an ability to sense subsonic Rayleigh waves from an earthquake minutes or hours before a tsunami strikes shore.
1883 - Krakatoa explosive eruption
The island volcano of Krakatoa in Indonesia exploded with devastating fury in 1883, blowing its underground magma chamber partly empty so that much overlying land and seabed collapsed into it. A series of large tsunami waves was generated from the explosion, some reaching a height of over 40 meters above sea level. Tsunami waves were observed throughout the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the American West Coast, South America, and even as far away as the English Channel. On the facing coasts of Java and Sumatra the sea flood went many miles inland and caused such vast loss of life that one area was never resettled but went back to the jungle and is now the Ujung Kulon nature reserve.
1896 - Japan
One of the worst tsunami disasters engulfed whole villages along Sanriku, Japan,. A wave more than seven stories tall (about 20 m) drowned some 26,000 people. 
1946 - Hawaii 
An earthquake in the Aleutian Islands sent a tsunami to Hawaii, killing 159 people (only five died in Alaska). 
1958 Alaska
A very localized tsunami in Lituya Bay, Alaska was the highest ever recorded: more than 500 m (1500 ft) above sea level. It did not extend much beyond the outlet of the fjord in which it occurred but did kill two people in a fishing vessel. 
1960 - Chilean tsunami
The Great Chilean Earthquake, at magnitude 9.5 the largest earthquake ever recorded, off the coast of South Central Chile, generated one of the most destructive tsunamis of the 20th century. It spread across the entire Pacific Ocean, with waves measuring up to 25 meters high. When the tsunami hit Onagawa, Japan, almost 22 hours after the quake, a tide gauge recorded a wave height of 10 feet above high tide. The number of people killed by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami is estimated to be between 490 to 2,290.
1964 - Good Friday tsunami
After the magnitude 9.2 Good Friday Earthquake, tsunamis up to 6 m tall struck Alaska, British Columbia and coastal Pacific Northwest towns, killing 122 people and went as far away as Crescent City, California.
1976 Philippines
August 16 (midnight) a tsunami killed more than 5000 people in the Moro Gulf region (Cotabato city) of the Philippines. 
1983 Japan 
104 people in western Japan were killed by a tsunami spawned from a nearby earthquake. 
July 17, 1998 Papua New Guinea
A Papua New Guinea tsunami killed roughly 2200 people. A 7.1 magnitude earthquake 15 miles offshore was followed within 10 minutes by a tsunami about 12 m tall. While the magnitude of the quake was not large enough to create these waves directly, it is believed the earthquake generated an undersea landslide, which in turn caused the tsunami. The villages of Arop and Warapu were destroyed. 
2004 - Indian Ocean tsunami
The magnitude 9.0 of the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake triggered a series of lethal tsunamis on December 26, 2004 that killed more than 160,000 people, making it the deadliest tsunami in recorded history. The tsunami killed people over an area ranging from the immediate vicinity of the quake in Indonesia, Thailand and the north-western coast of Malaysia to thousands of kilometers away in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and even as far as Somalia and Kenya in eastern Africa. Unlike the Pacific Ocean, there is no organized alert service covering the Indian Ocean. This is in part due to the absence of major tsunami events since 1883. 

Future threats
In 2001, scientists predicted that a future eruption of the unstable Cumbre Vieja volcano in La Palma (an island of the Canary Islands) could cause a giant undersea landslide. Later it was proved to be less than had originally been theorized. The next volcanic eruption is expected in the second half of the 21st century, but it is not necessarily the eruption that causes an immediate landslide. In the worst case scenario, the western half of the island (weighing perhaps 500 billion tonnes) would catastrophically slide into the ocean. Such a landslide could cause a 100 m wave to devastate the coast of northwest Africa, with a 10-25 m tsunami reaching the east coast of North America 7-8 hours later causing massive coastal devastation and the deaths of perhaps thousands of people, threatening Miami, suburbs of New York, parts of Boston, and all coastal cities in between.

HOW TO HELP THE SURVIVORS 
No gowns, no used underwear, please!
Next time you want to play good samaritan to victims of disasters, take care not to make them fashion victims as well. If you're donating clothes, don't include inappropriate clothing such as gowns or "see-through'' outfits. Make sure the garments you are giving away are not "overused'' and are still fit for wearing. And please, no second-hand underwear. 
These may sound amusing, but they are the "lessons" that the humanitarian group Tabang Mindanaw considers important enough to share with other disaster management teams following its recent experience with relief work in the storm-ravaged areas of Luzon. 
Tabang executive coordinator Ms Milet Mendoza said she was shocked to find that the clothes that well-meaning citizens had donated included items "just coming out of the closet after a long period of no use or even of overuse." 
Ms Mendoza acknowledged that Filipinos are generous providers of hand-me-downs for disaster victims. "The volume is usually tremendous, but it will be helpful if the donor individual or organizations were to take charge of quality control", she said. Personal effects like underwear, for example, "should always be brand new, and please, no gowns or see-through faddish attire, which undoubtedly cannot protect from the cold and rain", she added. 
"Donate only clothes and personal items that you yourself will find decent to use.'' Ms Mendoza stressed these points in an instructional booklet she intends to send out to other humanitarian organizations, including the government, in the hope that it would help to "improve"' the way the community responds to major calamities. 

- The Philippine Daily Inquirer\ANN 

RESPECT THE IDENTITIES OF THE DEAD AFTER DISASTERS
Rejecting myths arising out of major historical plagues, relief workers coping with large numbers of people killed by natural disasters such as the year end's earthquake and tsunami in South Asia should make every effort to respect the traditions of the affected communities and preserve the individual identities of the dead. In a new manual called "Management of Dead Bodies in Disaster Situations," the Americas' bureau of the UN World Health Organization (WHO), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), says when deaths result only from disasters, the corpses do not pose a major risk for the spread of infection. "Regrettably, we continue to be witness to the use of common graves and mass cremations for the rapid disposal of dead bodies owing to the myths and beliefs that corpses pose a high risk of epidemics," PAHO Director Mirta Roses writes in the book's foreword. "These measures are carried out without respecting identification processes or preserving the individuality of the deceased." Victims should not be buried in mass graves, nor should mass cremations take place if these procedures contravene local cultural and religious norms, the 176-page manual says. Bodies should be buried in a way that permits any needed later exhumation, identification, transfer and final disposal. "This is a basic human right of surviving family members," PAHO says. Myths about the necessity of hasty mass burials came from such experiences as the 14th century "Black Death," which claimed one-third of Europe's 75 million people, the US National Institutes of Health's Karl Western writes. When certain corpses may carry such communicable diseases as tuberculosis, hepatitis and HIV, the manual recommends protective ways of handling them.

Characteristics
At high speeds tsunamis travel great transoceanic distances with little energy loss, and cause damage thousands of kilometers from their origin, so there may be several hours between its creation and its impact on a coast, arriving long after seismic wave generated by the originating event arrive. For example, in the Pacific Ocean, where the typical water depth is about 4000 m, a tsunami travels at about 200 m/s (720 km/hr or 442 mi/hr) with little energy loss, even over long distances. At a water depth of 40 m, the speed would be 20 m/s (about 72 km/hr or 44 mi/hr), which is much slower than the speed in the open ocean but the wave would still be difficult to outrun.
In open water, tsunamis have extremely long periods (the time for the next wave top to pass a point after the previous one), from minutes to hours, and long wavelengths of up to several hundred kilometers. The actual height of a tsunami wave in open water is often less than one meter; practically unnoticeable to people on ships. 
As the wave approaches land, the sea shallows and the wave no longer travels as quickly, so it begins to 'pile-up': the wave becomes steeper and taller, and there is less distance between crests. While a person at the surface of deep water would probably not even notice the tsunami, the wave can increase to a height of 30 m or more as it approaches the coastline and compresses.
A wave becomes a 'shallow-water wave' when the ratio between the water depth and its wavelength gets very small, and since a tsunami has an extremely large wavelength (hundreds of kilometers). Tsunamis propagate outward from their source, so coasts in the "shadow" of affected land masses are usually fairly safe. However, tsunami waves can diffract around land masses as seen in this Indian Ocean tsunami as the waves reach southern Sri Lanka and India. They are not necessarily symmetrical and may be much stronger in one direction than another, depending on the nature of the source and the surrounding geography.