“It was as if my village had been wiped out by an atomic bomb.” Better than lengthy descriptions, this testimony from a tsunami survivor, recounting the devastation of the Indonesian town of Banda Aceh and its surroundings on December 26, 2004, captures the cataclysmic power of the event. Two decades have passed, and those harrowing images of the coastal city – whose buildings were swept away like the straw and wooden houses in the story of The Three Little Pigs – have, in part, faded from memory.
The most devastating tsunami ever recorded in human history also severely impacted Thailand, India and Sri Lanka. In total, it caused 230,000 deaths (including nearly 170,000 in Indonesia alone), with some estimates suggesting as many as 290,000 victims. A conference organized in the French town of Thiais (south of Paris) on December 12 and 13 by the Laboratoire de Géographie Physique (Laboratory of Physical Geography), reviewed two decades of research on tsunamis, highlighting that the 2004 event sparked both international awareness of the risks associated with these phenomena and a significant mobilization of researchers.
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