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Consulting the web, Mike discovered that the quake's epicenter had been
only ten kilometers from where we had been diving. Its strength had been a
hefty 5.4 on the Richter scale. The dif erence between the ef ects of the quake
above and beneath the water was astonishing. We realized that the water,
eight hundred times as dense as air, had magnifi ed the pounding ef ect of the
compression waves generated by the quake. We also realized that otherwise
inexplicable features of coral reefs that we had encountered at many places
over the years, such as masses of dead corals lying deep underwater where
the sunlight could not reach them, and table corals that had been tipped away
from the horizontal, must have been the result of earthquake activity.
I had experienced a number of minor earthquakes above water, but had
never encountered the true power of our endlessly shifting planet until that
moment in the Miil Channel. Mike told me that he had actually been under-
water in the Maldive Islands during the 2004 tsunami that had swept across
Figure 38 This picture is the only one I had the presence of mind to take of the underwater
landslide following the earthquake.
 
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