The Tsunami, Twenty Years On
By 
The Indian Ocean Tsunami was twenty years ago today.
The tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004, quickly escalated into a global disaster. Across 17 countries, nearly a quarter million people died and 1.7 million were displaced, mostly from Aceh, an Indonesian province on the northern tip of Sumatra. Property damage, amounting to $13 billion, left some towns unrecognizable.
Vasily Titov, a scientist at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory who simulates tsunamis, was shaken. “Theoretical knowledge is one thing,” he said. “Seeing what it was in real life is completely different.”
At the time the tsunami was something that was so enormous that it beggared the imagination. More dead than the entire Iraq War to that point, all in a morning? We were slow to discuss at LGM; the early archives have all been reconstructed from the original so it’s hard to tell for sure, but I don’t think we started talking about it until early January. I don’t know enough to say what kinds of enduring changes the tsunami produced in the regions where it caused the most damage (commenters contribute, please); I can say that it changed how the United States Navy thought about maritime power, at least for a while (the pendulum is swinging back on that one, though).