My mother, trusting email user that she is, forwarded me this potential fake today. Has anyone encountered it? Real? Fake? Snopes doesn’t seem to have anything about it up yet.
What’s the word for that - spooge? Splurge?
There have been some very similar photos in the *Sydney Morning Herald * over recent days, although I’m not suggesting that that is any guarantee of their authenticity.
Yes, it’s real. More before and after images (including yours) can be found here:
http://www.digitalglobe.com/tsunami_gallery.html
The answer may be found by clicking on the Digital Globe link at the bottom of the web page and seeing it for yourself (you know, the web site from where the images were “borrowed” in the first place).
I saw a video tape that was made several miles inland 25 minutes after the 9.0 earquake. Naturally, very frightened people were in the street trying to find their loved ones under the rubble. There was much crying and confusion. Suddenly water appeared. At first there was two feet of it. Within seconds there was a seemingly endless twenty foot wall of water FILLED with debris – houses, cars, trucks, buses, boards, trees, human beings – pushing through the streets.
I have heard that cartographers are remapping that part of the world based on what can be seen from satallites.
More images from the National University of Singapore: http://www.crisp.nus.edu.sg/tsunami/tsunami.html
If you follow the links under “Aceh Besar district, Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia”, you’ll see larger images of the area in the OP.
I don’t think you need quotes around that “borrowed”.
From DigitalGlobe :
DigitalGlobe products may be published electronically, in hardcopy or in broadcast as long as credit is conspicuously provided to “DigitalGlobe” .
So it’s all perfectly legal.
Yopu may be thinking of “glurge”, although that is usually applied to the sort of sickly sweet and/or tearjerking, supposedly “heart-warming” tale, often with a religious slant, that is the scourge of email inboxes everywhere.
I am interested to know why you though this might be fake, BTW.
At least one US intelligence agency has remapped some portions to aid in the relief efforts: places to land, roads that are available and such have changed so much that anyone that has to travel to affected areas needs new maps.
I’ve seen that picture in several other totally-reputable publications. While an extreme, it helps illustrate the magnitude of the rebuilding problem: The land can’t be rebuilt on because the land isn’t there anymore.
Splooge*?
Is it still like that, or did the water recede later? Some of the pictures didn’t show that much destruction afterwards, just a muddy mess. But wouldn’t the water recede, then dry out, and leave the shore lines in the same place? Or did the water push the land down, or erode so much that the shape of the shore changed? I’m pretty sure that sea level didn’t rise.
:eek:
No cites, but I read that the net effect of the quake was to raise the island of Sumatra by several feet. I imagine that the changes in the land are mostly due to erosion - the Banda Aceh “after” pictures here were taken on December 28, two days after the tsunami, so I would think the sea had receded as much as it was going to. Bear in mind that much of the land was very low-lying and some was reclaimed from swamps/mangroves. The sea has claimed it back.
So no, the shoreline is definitely not the same as it was before. In some areas, there may be new land, due to erosion and deposition and/or the uplift of the plate; while in others, land has been lost.
Duckster, I couldn’t open the link you gave (pop-up blocker, even when I turned the thing off), but my parents used to work for that agency - they’re retired now. (It used to be Army Mapping, then Defense Mapping, then morphed with some other agencies into its present form - my dad was one of the small team of people who planned that whole integration.)
Anyway, they said those satellite pictures are absolutely real. They’re really proud of what they’re old agency is doing in regards to relief efforts. Like I said, they’re retired, but if anyone had any questions about this agency and what they do, I could relay any questions to them.
Oh, mostly because my Mother’s the type of person to FWD: anything, so this came between a “new phone scam!” and “help this child!” glurge e-mails.
Also, the two pictures look like they’re from two different magnifications or zooms or something; they’re not exactly in proportion to eatch other, which sent up a red flag that someone may be tampering.
The quake was if I’m correct was caused by subduction where one plate slides under the other. In effect raising one side and lowering the other. I had heard mention of approximately 60 inches lower, sorry I have no cite for these figures and I could well be wrong but could you imagine how much of a difference 60 inches would make to a coast line.