The Final Frames

Fifteen years ago, when a tsunami raced across the Indian Ocean and devastated communities in southern Asia, scientists found a new tool to help them understand the deadly waves: amateur video.

- Gloria Dickie

Hermann Fritz heard the news on the radio. It was the day after Christmas in 2004, and Fritz, a civil engineer who lived in Georgia, was visiting his parents’ home in Zurich, Switzerland, for the holidays. The reporter’s voice crackled through the speaker: There had been an earthquake in the Indian Ocean. A tsunami had followed. Thousands of people were presumed dead.

Fritz, then 32, was shocked by the human toll. But he also listened with professional interest. He’d recently been hired as a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Savannah, where he studied tsunamis. Unlike beach waves guided by wind, tsunamis gain their momentum from earthquakes, volcanoes, or landslides that can occur deep in oceans or lakes or along the shores and displace massive amounts of water. The jolt triggers a series of waves that swell over minutes, or in some cases hours, reaching heights taller than most buildings. Fritz knew all this, but there hadn’t been a tsunami-like this in his lifetime.

To his dismay, the news provided few details, so Fritz logged on to the boxy family computer and plugged in the URL for the United States Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center to see what he could find out.

A displacement had occurred between the India and Burma plates, 45 miles off the west coast of northern Sumatra. The earthquake’s initial magnitude was estimated at 8.0 on the Richter scale, and scientists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center had expected, at most, some regional tsunami damage on nearby islands. But they were wrong. Almost 40 hours after the quake, they learned that its true force stayed hidden as it traveled along 745 miles of fault line. Seismologists upgraded the magnitude to 9.0, but the final reading, published in May 2005, indicated that the Indian Ocean quake had one of the highest magnitudes ever recorded: 9.1.