Abstract

One of the greatest tsunamis occurred in Indian Ocean last year, just a day after Christmas on Sunday, December 26, 2005. The tsunami was a result of a great earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 on the Richter scale. The earthquake originated in the Indian Ocean just west of northern Sumatra, Indonesia. The resulting tsunami traveled across the Indian Ocean and devastated the shores of many countries: Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and even the further of Somalia, South Africa, Madagascar, and Kenya. Some energy from the tsunami in Indian Ocean even leaked into the Pacific Ocean, affecting se level fluctuations along the west coast of South America.

Due to the massive energy of the earthquake, the Indian Ocean tsunami becomes the second deadliest tsunami in history which resulted in a total death toll of 217,000 with the largest victims from Indonesia, my home country. Therefore it becomes my motivation to study the characteristics of tsunami wave particularly observing the effect of basin topography to the propagation of tsunami waves. Then, I will use simple calculations studied in the class to obtain simple formula to calculate the run-up height of tsunami at the coast.

Figure 1: The epicenter of Indian Ocean earthquake