How tsunami science has progressed twenty years after the Indonesian cataclysm

"It's as if my village had been razed by an atomic bomb." Better than long descriptions, this testimony from a survivor of the tsunami that, on December 26, 2004, devastated the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh and its surrounding areas, speaks to the cataclysmic power of the phenomenon. Two decades have passed, and we have partly forgotten these hallucinatory images of the coastal city whose buildings were swept away like the straw and wood houses in the story of the Three Little Pigs.

The most devastating tsunami in recorded human history also hit Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka hard. In total, it caused 230,000 deaths (including nearly 170,000 in Indonesia alone), and some estimates suggest as many as 290,000 victims. Organized in Thiais (Val-de-Marne) on December 12 and 13 by the Physical Geography Laboratory, a conference took stock of research conducted over the past twenty years on tsunamis, recalling that the 2004 event had triggered both an international awareness of the risks associated with these phenomena and a strong mobilization of researchers.

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