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This information may be helpful to students doing School Projects or Assignments on Tsunamis. For more detail including tsunami photos and movies, feel free to browse through our recommended links.

• Tsunami (pronounced soo-nar-me) is a Japanese word; 'tsu' meaning harbour and 'nami' meaning wave. A tsunami is a series of great sea waves caused by an underwater earthquake, landslide, or volcanic eruption, and sometimes, meteor collisions.
  
• Tsunamis occur frequently in Japan and over the centuries, many thousands of Japanese have been killed by them. Tsunamis are sometimes incorrectly called tidal waves but have nothing to do with tides.
  
• A tsunami can also be generated by an enormous meteor impact with the ocean. Scientists have found traces of an asteroid-collision event that they say would have created a giant tsunami that swept around the Earth several times, inundating everything except the mountains 3.5 billion years ago. The coastline of the continents was changed drastically and almost all life on land was exterminated.
  
• The Indian Ocean Tsunami was spawned by the most powerful earthquake in decades on December 26, 2004, killing more than 150,000 people and making millions of people homeless. It is probably the most destructive tsunami in recorded history with waves as high as 9 meters (30 feet) in some places. The epicenter of quake was 9.0 on the Richter scale occurring under the Indian Ocean near the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. A violent movement of the Earth's tectonic plates displaced a massive amount of water, sending powerful shock waves in every direction. Within hours, killer waves radiating from the epicenter slammed into the coastline of eleven Indian Ocean countries, snatching people out to sea, drowning others in their homes or on beaches, and demolishing property from Africa to Thailand.
  
• A tsunami is not a single wave but a series of waves, also known as a wave train. The first wave in a tsunami is not necessarily the most destructive.
  
• Tsunami waves can be very long (as much as 60 miles, or 100 kilometers) and be as far as one hour apart. They are able to cross entire oceans without great loss of energy. The Indian Ocean tsunami traveled as much as 3,000 miles (nearly 5,000 kilometers) to Africa, arriving with sufficient force to kill people and destroy property.
  
• When the ocean is deep tsunamis can travel unnoticed on the surface at speeds up to 500 miles per hour (800 kilometers per hour), crossing the entire ocean in a day or less. Scientists are able to calculate arrival times of tsunamis in different parts of the world based on their knowledge of when the event that generated them occurred, water depths, and distances.
  
• Flooding can extend inland by a thousand feet (300 meters) or more. The enormous energy of a tsunami can lift giant boulders, flip vehicles, and demolish houses.
  
• Tsunamis do not necessarily make their final approach to land as a series of giant breaking waves. They may be more like a very rapidly rising tide. This may be accompanied by much underwater turbulence, sucking people under and tossing heavy objects around. Entire beaches have been stripped away by tsunamis.
  
• Click Here to download an informative PowerPoint presentation - "The Facts About Tsunamis"