A terrible beauty

We visited the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich yesterday. They had a display on tsunamis.

Apparently they look a bit like this, as a surge of energy from a shift in a tectonic plate shoots up from the sea floor. (I took the photo from an interactive display at the museum - see my Flickr page.)

The NMM website says more:

Tsunamis are very different from the wind-generated waves which constantly roll onto our beaches. Tsunamis may be likened to a large-scale version of the ripples caused by a stone dropping into a pond. Similarly, tsunamis events may also consist of numerous, separate wave fronts moving away from the site of disturbance.

Horrrible that something so beautiful in its physics could cause such terrifying devastation.

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