Random Thoughts:

What tiny drops of water can do!

S. Pathiravitana

Need we say anything more to describe how what one regards as the softest, gentlest of substances on this earth has been doing to us in the wink of an eyelid in the dying days of 2004. Whether a tsunami prompted Lao Tsu to make this observation or whether his inherent intuition into things revealed to him this truth is immaterial. We now know what the weak and gentle can do.

The poetry of this Chinese sage has been converted into statistics by modern scientists and we are told that water could be converted by Nature into acting as a 30,000 ton powerful Atom bomb, like what happened off Sumatra the other day.

Newspaper headlines snappily announced that a tidal wave had invaded the country. But what really hit the littoral of our country was a tsunami. The difference is very important. Imagine an object being dropped into a calm pool of water. At once the ripples spread in concentric circles.

That is what happened at Sumatra. A quake of the ocean floor created shock waves. And these shock waves spread in an expanding circle, travelling great distances and touching the littorals of the entire South East Asian region with varying degrees of intensity. A tidal wave, on the other hand, is created by a hurricane or cyclone. In that process it raises the water over which it blows creating what is called a storm surge. If this surge happens at high tide than it pushes the water in the direction it wants to go and floods the land.

Affected

Such an event took place in 1970 in the Bay of Bengal. But the only country affected by it was poor Bangladesh. They estimated that 500,000 people disappeared in that flood. Earthquakes, however, have killed even more people than that.

There is the case of an earthquake in China recorded in a place called Huasien that killed 830,000 in the year 1556. Somehow it so happens that the known deaths by a tsunami, in comparison with that earthquake, though much less, are more sensational, more agonising and more astounding.

The highest recorded earthquake 9.5 on the Richter scale is the one that took place in 1960 in Chile. Chilean deaths were 2000. The waves or rather trains of waves that were generated by the tsunami that followed, crossed the Pacific Ocean and raced to Japan a distance of over six thousand miles at great speed and on the way killed 61 in Hawaii and 122 when it reached Japan.

This is the real danger of a tsunami - the extensive damage it spreads to areas where one least expects it as we in Sri Lanka who were under the impression we were living in a quake free zone. That picture is changing now.

There is a possibility that a new zone is building up to the south of Sri Lanka that may have links with the earthquake belt. It is because of that suspicion that the Californian earthquake research institute set up some years ago a data gathering information post in Pallekale.

As the Director of Geology and Mines who was participating in a TV panel discussion on this subject of the tsunami explained, Pallekele is not an information processing centre that requires a staff. All that it does is to transmit the information gathered to that Californian research headquarters where it is processed. No human presence is required for this service at Pallekelle because the gathering and transmitting is all done automatically. One needs only a watcher and that is also to keep the place clean.

Explanation

Incidentally, the Director of Geology revealed during his explanation that there are about 130 such information gathering centres set up by this Californian Research centre throughout the world in order to get a good seismological picture of the earth. The information carried by a section of the media that the tsunami warning had come to Pallekelle is, in the light of what the Director of Geology said, obviously misleading.

The suspicion that we are nearing an earthquake-tsunami belt may be due to certain historical references to flooding by the sea of certain coastal areas. Vihara Maha Devi being set afloat to appease the angry gods is now well known.

The Times of India recently published a story, soon after the Chennai coast was overrun by the recent tsunami that hit us too, of a similar event taking place about 900 CE. The victim of that probable tsunami was Nagapattinam. The information gathered about that event is somewhat meagre, but is authenticated by records found in the library of the Thondaiman kingdom in Pudukottai of Tamil Nadu.

The information available at this library tells that during the reign of Raja Raja Chola that coastal land was overrun by the sea and a prominent building that got washed into the sea was a Buddhist monastery and several other temples.

This disaster is also referred to in a novel written by Ponniah Selvam called The Pinnacle of Sacrifice. In a chapter called The Sea Rises the rising of the sea is described rather extravagantly. It rose, he says, so high that it seemed to touch the dark clouds suspended over the ocean. ‘The black mountain of water, far from being stationary, was moving steadily forwarded.’

This description does not quite tally with the reports we had about our tsunami. Far from the sky being ominously dark it was a bright and sunny morning with not even a hint of the terror the ocean was plotting to unleash. But the aftermath of the invasion of the sea is identical.

‘The sea inundated warehouses and sheds and began to flow into the streets. Ships and boats seemed suspended in mid air, precariously poised on the water peaks.’

Well, that is not the only instance of the overrunning of the land by the sea in our neighbour’s land. The Silapathikkaram, considered one of the great classics in Tamil literature, also records how a place called Cauvery Poompatinam, which is now known as Poompuhar, says the Times of India, was destroyed.

Archaeologists now working on this site have begun unfolding the ruins. Perhaps they may have more to tell us whether, for instance, the destruction of this place was caused by a tsunami or one of those tidal invasions that took place in Bangladesh last.

The Director of Geology also admitted that after the 1883 Krakatoa explosion there were reports of the overflow of our sea.

That was not the only instant he said in more recent times. There are also records in the Archives of a similar invasion of our land in the 17th century by the sea.

I began this narration with a quote from Lao Tse. He was bent on saying how the weak and timid can overcome the stiffest of obstacles.

Now that we have seen how a unified wall of water, almost casually picks up an entire railway train filled with about a 1,000 human beings and tosses it aside, along with a twisted track, the lesson is clear.

Mahatma Gandhi, the half naked fakir as he was called by the Englishman, showed him how the mighty British Empire had to fold up in India by simple acts like making your own salt and spinning your own clothes. The great ocean that surrounds us is only showing what unified drops of water can do.