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Earth science

The sands of tsunami time

The scale of the 2004 tsunami that devastated shores around the Indian Ocean has no precedent in written histories of the region. But evidence of similar events has been unearthed from the geological record.

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Figure 1: The town of Lhoknga, on the northwest coast of Sumatra, before (left) and after the tsunami of 26 December 2004.

IKONOS IMAGES/CRISP; NATL UNIV. SINGAPORE/GEOEYE

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Bondevik, S. The sands of tsunami time. Nature 455, 1183–1184 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/4551183a

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