From Delhi Online: ‘We can tell a tsunami from its amplitude, frequency’.
Posted on January 7, 2005 09:12 PM. Filed under: environment.They do not memorise the laws of simple harmonic motion. But they know how to judge the frequency and amplitude of sea waves, a knowledge that saved around 266 Jarawas when the killer tsunami wrecked havoc on the "civilised world".
For Pramod Kumar, a research scholar from the school of linguistics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, talking to the tribals, who inhabit Kadamtalla and Bara Tang in the Middle Andamans, after the disaster, was a revelation. Over the past one year, he has been working with the Jarawas, trying to draw up a written text of Jarawa grammar, his Phd topic. Kumar returned from his "workplace" in the Middle Andamans on Wednesday night.
"Immediately after the tsunami, we interviewed several tribals in an effort to find out what exactly had forewarned them. An elderly Jarawa man called Chew, explained that there is a stark contrast between the amplitude and frequency of normal tidal waves and those of a tsunami. The moment the first wave was spotted, the tribals knew what was coming and fled to the highlands," Kumar recounts. [continue]