Twenty years ago, the seafloor west of Indonesia abruptly pushed upward as a deep undersea fault, where two of Earth’s tectonic plates meet, slipped. The upward shove violently shifted the seawater above, transferring deadly energy from ground to water, and sending the water speeding toward land.
The series of tsunamis generated by that magnitude 9.2 earthquake reached towering heights; Indonesia’s Banda Aceh, close to the epicenter, was engulfed by a wall of water 51 meters tall. The waves killed an estimated 230,000 people across 15 countries, with tens of thousands more reported missing.
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