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Oregon
Offshore lies a fault that in centuries past has triggered large earthquakes—and tsunamis that swamped the coast. These houses at Cannon Beach sit just inside an evacuation zone based on a worst-case scenario. As the world's coasts get more crowded, geologists are finding that tsunamis occur more often than once thought. -
Photograph by Tamon Suzuki
Japan
More than 1,500 people died last March in Rikuzentakata, one of several towns eradicated by the tsunami. "As the buildings were destroyed, black, dusty smoke was thrown up," a survivor told an Al Jazeera reporter. "Then the tsunami swallowed up the smoke." -
Photograph by Jiji Press/AFP/Getty Images
Japan
Black with muck scoured from the harbor, the first tsunami wave pours over a seawall in Miyako, carrying vans and boats. Japan's defenses were no match for waves far higher than scientists had predicted. -
Photograph by Shinichi Sato, Kyodo/AP Images
Japan
As waves battered the disaster-readiness center in Minamisanriku, ten people—including Mayor Jin Sato—survived by clinging to handrails and a radio antenna. -
Photograph by Michael Yamashita
Japan
Something always draws people back to the sea—and to facsimiles thereof. At the Summerland wave pool in Tokyo last August hundreds of fun seekers found relief from a hot afternoon and from months of tragic news. -
Photograph by Charles and Emma Jean Mader, Mader Consulting
Splash of the Century
In the fall, brown alders along the shore of Lituya Bay, Alaska, still trace the path taken in 1958 by the tallest tsunami ever recorded. When an earthquake dropped some 40 million cubic yards of rock from the bare slope in the background into the head of the fjord, the splash surged 1,700 feet up the opposite hillside—higher than the Empire State Building. As the wave barreled toward the mouth of the bay, where it was still more than 25 feet high, it flattened millions of conifers, which have since been replaced by alders. It killed two people on an anchored boat. -
Indonesia
A U.S. Marine helicopter loaded with food flies over Lampuuk in northern Sumatra on January 4, 2005, nine days after a tsunami killed most of the village's 7,000 residents—and some 230,000 people on coastlines around the Indian Ocean. Many locals believe divine intervention saved the Rahmatullah mosque. -
Indonesia
In March 2005 a second earthquake off Sumatra unleashed only moderate waves—but lowered the land in some coastal areas by three feet, triggering flooding. On Pulau Balai, Rahmaniar, 23, still walks on coral chunks she used to raise her home's floor above the tides. -
A fault that runs under Puget Sound could cause a damaging earthquake in Seattle—seen here from a boat floating above the fault—and a tsunami that would strike the waterfront in less than ten minutes.
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Sumatra
A diorama in the Aceh Tsunami Museum in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, dramatizes the moment on December 26, 2004, when a tsunami struck the city. Before that date, few people in Banda Aceh had even heard the word "tsunami." Now nearly everyone in the city can tell a story of survival and loss. -
Indonesia
As night falls and the tide rises on the Indonesian island of Pulau Balai, off the west coast of Sumatra, more than an inch of water washes into the home of 20-year-old Busrani. In March 2005 a seafloor earthquake lowered the island by three feet. Busrani can't afford to raise his floor, which floods at every high tide. -
Photograph by Michael Yamashita
Japan
A month after the March 2011 tsunami, Toshiya Kanaka, 79, dries clothes amid the ruins of his home in Otsuchi, Japan. Like thousands of survivors along the Tohoku coast, Kanaka and his wife were living in a refugee center, hoping their home might be rebuilt. -
Photograph by Michael Yamashita
Japan
By August 2011 much of the wreckage had been cleared from Kanaka's property, and the grass had regrown. But Kanaka and his wife were still living at a nearby junior high school. -
Photograph by Michael Yamashita
Japan
At the "photo rescue center" in tsunami-ravaged Rikuzentakata, Japan, two volunteers organize notebooks holding photos recovered from the ruins. In the aftermath of the disaster, a dozen or so survivors came here each day, searching for personal mementos. -
Photograph by Michael Yamashita
Japan
In August 2011, on the eve of Obon, a Buddhist festival that honors the memory of the dead, residents of Kesennuma, Japan, light candles for victims of the tsunami. The candles form the character for "prayer."
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