Talk:2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami

Semi-protected edit request on 31 January 2024
Under paragraph heading Meulaboh, sentence reads: "Helicopter surveys showed entire settlements virtually destroyed with destruction within miles inland, and only some mosques left standing." This is a run-on sentence with redundant word usage. Change to "Helicopter surveys showed entire settlements destroyed. Destruction continued miles inland, with some mosques being the only buildings left standing. 50.239.26.178 (talk) 15:24, 31 January 2024 (UTC) — Urro[ talk ] [ edits ] 15:53, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
 * ✅ but reworded.

Semi-protected edit request on 25 March 2024
There is a paragraph under the heading Tsunami, sub-heading Early Signs and Warnings, talking about how in some places the waterline receded and caused fatalities due to people picking up fish from the beach and being hit by the tsunami. This should be changed to include the reason for this, Positive and Negative parts of the tsunami wave. The waterline receded because the negative part of the wave hit it first. Jalapenosz (talk) 22:22, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. YouTube is not a reliable source. Drowssap  SMM  19:47, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 4 May 2024
add to « In Popular Culture section ».

Other Lives but Mine (French: D'autres vies que la mienne, published as Lives Other Than My Own in the United States) is a 2009 non-fiction book by the French writer Emmanuel Carrère that tells the stories of several people he had met. Carrère was vacationing in Sri Lanka at the time of the tsunami, and part of the book focuses on the aftermath and the tragedy of a French family who lost their four-year old daughter, Juliette. 2603:7000:6401:18AD:A979:D45B:AE7:E0F1 (talk) 04:15, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. Charliehdb (talk) 13:23, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Death toll again
We now carry two totals in the body of the article, 227,898 and 229,866, both with impeccable sourcing, the difference being mainly in the total for India - I note that looking back through the web archives for the latter source that it was updated in January 2006. There are a lot of sources out there that use the approximation 230,000. This is qualified by "around", "about", "almost", "approximately", "nearly", "up to". Others say "greater than" but in one case the more nuanced "may exceed 230,000", a source that is itself cited to support "more than" in other sources. 280,000 is also still used in other sources, presumably referring back to earlier estimates before Indonesia reduced there numbers by 50,000. I'm personally comfortable with what is in the article now. Mikenorton (talk) 12:16, 19 May 2024 (UTC)


 * @Mikenorton Isn't there a dispute over the total for Malaysia? Reported I believe 61 victims, but someone say 600, though whether this is credible I have not checked. I'm unsure of whether 227,898 and 229,866 should be used in the info box, as 227,898 is the Synthesis Report's final toll and seems to be the popular figure nowadays, but plenty of studies refer to the 229,866 given by the UN Envoy, though their website is gone. Reaper1945 (talk) 17:10, 19 May 2024 (UTC)


 * You're thinking of Myanmar, not Malaysia and that is one reason for suspecting that the total may be in excess of 230,000 if we take the 229,866 number, but we have nothing definitive there. As I went looking for archived copies for the Human Toll given by the office of the UN envoy (not Bill Clinton himself), I noticed that the numbers were updated between different snapshots of the webpage. The biggest change was the number for India, which increased by nearly 6,000 between versions with the date of the source for the number changing between November 2005 and January 2006 (both Government of India). In contrast the number for India in the Synthesis Report derives from an article in December 2005 in Tribune India - which we should rely on is anybody's guess, as the latter mentions a reduction in the number of missing, to quote "India revised its earlier figure of 5,640 after lowering its estimate of people missing in Andaman and Nicobar Islands", which arguably refers to the number of missing, which it gives as 3,874. The difference between the two is 1,766, not quite the 1,968 between the two overall estimates, but it is the difference between the two estimates for India in the two lists. Most of the rest is the 196 extra deaths in Indonesia in the UN Office for the Envoy and I don't know where they came from. We'll never get a true answer and it's not worth trying I suspect. For various reasons the lower figure is I think preferable, but I'm happy that we include the higher number as an alternative. I've been searching for recent updates but found nothing definitive, so we may have to wait for the 20th anniversary later this year. Mikenorton (talk) 20:24, 19 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I've looked for quite a bit on the death toll numbers from recent estimations or studies and haven't had much luck. I have found quite a few more recent studies regarding its magnitude however, which is why I changed it to be between Mw 9.2–9.3, and the most recent study on the 1964 Alaskan earthquake compares previous studies and most give 9.1, including itself, so that has been revised. Reaper1945 (talk) 20:31, 19 May 2024 (UTC)
 * @Mikenorton Also note a 2014 study I incorporated which gives a figure of 172,761 for Indonesia, higher than the usual number given. Reaper1945 (talk) 20:31, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Magnitude
I'm not sure about changing the magnitude. A very quick analysis of the titles of papers listed using the ISC link (all 959 of them) in the infobox gives the following number of mentions: 9.0 12, 9.1 9, 9.2 14, 9.3 11, although of course that's just the titles, but it is indicative that we should be keeping a bigger range than just 9.2–9.3. Mikenorton (talk) 21:08, 19 May 2024 (UTC) And the USGS use 9.1 referring to Duputel et al. (2012, although confusingly they give M9.2 in the paper. Mikenorton (talk) 21:18, 19 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I based it off the revised magnitudes in the most recent studies, such as Kenji Satake and colleagues revising their magnitude from Mw 9.1 in 2007 to Mw 9.2 in 2017, the 2016 Bletery et al study which gives Mw 9.25 and notes its close to the Mw 9.3 obtained through normal mode analyses. The "latest" study in the 2000s which actually calculates the magnitude, from what I've been able to find, is the 2007 study by Stein and Okal of Mw 9.3. There's this 2017 study as well of Mw 9.35, though you may want to look at it. Reaper1945 (talk) 21:24, 19 May 2024 (UTC)
 * The USGS really does not seemingly update its figures, just gives 9.1 for both Tohoku and Sumatra, and then you note the study they cite giving 9.2. Reaper1945 (talk) 21:26, 19 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Even for the 1964 Alaskan earthquake, only one study gives a figure of 9.2, all studies well after it give it 9.07, 9.12, or 9.14. Reaper1945 (talk) 21:30, 19 May 2024 (UTC)


 * I note that Gopinathan et al. (2017) were not attempting to recalculate the magnitude. They themselves think that the high slips in the northern part of the rupture that their inversion produces are not real but a result of thick soft sediments beneath the seabed. Any reduction in slip would lead to a lower estimated magnitude (as they say). I'll take another look through the other more recent (since Stein & Okal) papers. Mikenorton (talk) 08:38, 20 May 2024 (UTC)


 * The most recent papers that set out to estimate magnitude (amongst other things) are Okal & Stein (2009) and Fujii et al. (2021). Okal & Stein confirm their earlier estimate of 9.3. Fujii et al. use tsunami data to invert for fault slip distribution and this gives a 9.2 magnitude, up from the 9.1 that they had previously calculated. In summary, 9.2–9.3 seems a fair range to have in the infobox. Mikenorton (talk) 11:13, 21 May 2024 (UTC)