The Asian Tsunami: Another Manmade Disaster

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Written By Cindy-Lou Dale

I find the conspiracy theorists of this world somewhat tiresome. Even more so, I am disbelieving of the feeble, highly processed and refined news stream that television provides. One such rhetoric is the recent tsunami tragedy of December 2004.

Compelled to find the truth I set out to write an article detailing the natural causes surrounding this disaster (and indirectly disprove the other theories doing the rounds). My findings however, were somewhat startling and as such, I am compelled to detail them below and ask that you draw your own conclusions.

Between November and December 2004 Reuters reported that 189 whales and dolphins beached themselves in Tasmania. An Australian senator spoke with the press and advised that sound bombings or seismic tests were being conducted on the ocean floor, testing for oil and gas, near the beaching site in Tasmania.

The sound pulses created by the release of air from up to 24 air-guns create low frequency sound waves potent enough to penetrate up to 24 miles below the seafloor. These underwater soundings generate more than 200dB, which roughly equates to a sound blast of around 155dB in the air.

Whales and dolphins communicate over immense distances and navigate by way of their sensitive sonar systems and are particularly sensitive to high intensity sonic vibrations.

According to the Australian Conservation Foundation, these 200dB blasts are fired every 10 seconds or so, from 10 meters below the surface, 24 hours a day, for two week periods of time.

At this juncture, allow me to briefly explain a little about resonance. Resonance is the frequency at which a material will vibrate. Once a material starts to resonate (however small the resonance), it moves up and down, and if it is brittle or unstable, the movement can become quite violent or the material can even shatter. An example would be the constant high pitched tone of a soprano opera singer shattering crystal. Another more relevant example is that in areas hit by earthquakes, some tall buildings simply collapse, whilst others remain standing. This was initially thought to be caused purely by poor construction or poor quality materials, but it was later proven that it was often caused by resonance, as every building has a resonant frequency at which it will vibrate. Vibration is manifestation of the absorption of resonant energy which then causes the building to shatter. Furthermore, one tectonic plate resonating against an adjacent stationary one can also have catastrophic consequences at the meeting point.

On December 24th, near the meeting point of the Australian, Indian and Burmese tectonic plates, a subterranean earthquake, measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale, occurred. Two days later, in Indonesia, the Indian and Burmese tectonic plates slipped by fifty feet along a 750 mile fault-line resulting in an earthquake, the fourth largest since 1900, measuring 9.0. The ocean floor above the fault-line was raised by several feet, forcing a massive convulsion of displaced water. The earthquake rocked Sumatra and moved the entire island approximately 100 feet south west and even disturbed the Earth’s rotation. Within ten minutes this vertical disturbance of the overlying seawater triggered a tsunami. Ten minutes later it had claimed its first victims in Sumatra. Within seven hours the tsunami’s death toll exceeded 226,000 — which roughly equates to the number of people killed in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bomb explosions of WW2.

Is there a possible connection between the tsunami earthquake and deep-sea seismic testing for oil off the coast of Australia? Could the constant barrage of high dB sound waves have been the catalyst of this quake? Or are we witnessing the repercussion of decades of environmental exploitation in mans’ never ending search for natural resources, like oil.

A relationship between these two earthquakes is considered quite possible by some seismologists saying that “the former one might have been a catalyst to the Indian Ocean earthquake, as the two quakes happened on opposite sides of the Indo-Australian tectonic plate.”

According to one such seismologist, tsunamis could be caused by one of two occurrences — landslides or explosions, such as underwater nuclear testing.

This statement guided my research to another theory.

There have been similar earthquakes to the South East of Tasmania. In 1998 an earthquake occurred south of Australia and New Zealand, between Macquarie Island and Antarctica. This quake triggered a tsunami which generated large surface waves for several hours. I asked a seismologist, who asked not to be named, what would cause such a seismic disturbance. “Landslides or more probably, underground explosions, such as nuclear testing.”

I looked a little further into the effects of nuclear test and discovered the following:

The U.S. has conducted 1,054 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1992. Before 1962, all the tests were atmospheric (on land or in the Pacific or Atlantic oceans), since then some 839 nuclear were carried out underground.

Between 1966 and 1990, the French conducted 167 nuclear tests on two atolls in French Polynesia — Morurua and Fangataua, of which 44 tests were atmospheric but since 1974 France carried out only underground tests. New nuclear warheads for France’s ‘Triompahnt’ class submarines were among these subterranean tests, which required shafts of between 1,600-4,000 feet to be bored into the basalt core of the atolls. At first, these shafts were drilled into the outer rim but in 1981, the tests with higher impact were moved to shafts drilled under the lagoon itself — most likely due to destabilization of that rim.

  • An independent health study of the people of French Polynesia has never been undertaken and the military records of the health of personnel from the site have not been released. There also appears to be no follow-up program to monitor workers’ health once they have left the site.
  • In 1963, the French Governor of Tahiti claimed “Not a single particle of radioactive fallout will ever reach an inhabited island.” But immediately after the first atmospheric tests, contaminated fish rained and radiation spread throughout the region.
  • According to the U.S. Department of Energy and the office of Science & Technical Information, French Polynesia’s soil has become so poisoned this once near self-sufficient colony now imports 80% of its food.
  • According to testimony from people affected by the tests, higher rates of cancer and birth abnormalities have been experienced by those living in French Polynesia.
  • The environmental safety of testing nuclear weapons underground at Mururoa has been the subject of major controversy and concern. Mururoa and its sister test site at Fangataufa now contain several Chernobyls worth of radioactivity. Testing threatens the geological stability of these fragile and vulnerable environments and makes leakage of large quantities of radionuclides into the marine environment an ever present threat.
  • Since 1975, more than 130 nuclear warheads have been detonated in deep shafts in the atoll, resulting in huge cavities that fill with molten rock and radioactive debris.
  • While the French authorities have argued that testing is safe, several scientific missions to the atoll (all of which have had severely limited access to the site) have raised serious concerns about its ability to contain the radioactivity released by underground tests.

In 1995, three French Polynesians, all residing in Tahiti, brought a legal case against the French government (Case T-219/95 R), Court transcripts reveal: “Short-term effects include geological damage and the venting of gaseous and volatile fission products into the biosphere. Nuclear tests can cause landslides and did indeed cause a major underwater landslide at Mururoa in 1979, when a nuclear device was exploded after jamming half-way down its shaft. Since the geology of Mururoa is already unstable due to large-scale fracturing caused by previous tests, further major landslides are likely.”

In the past, such landslides gave rise to tsunamis causing coastal damage in areas as far away as Pitcairn and Tahiti.

Continuing with court testimony: “Landslides can also release radioactive material into the sea. This would have a catastrophic effect on the food chain in French Polynesia, where fish is an important part of the diet.”

The court document also revealed that the Mururoa landslide shifted approximately one million cubic meters of coral and rock and created a cavity estimated at 460 feet in diameter. It produced a major tidal wave comparable to a tsunami, which spread through the Tuamotu Archipelago and injured people on the southern part of the Mururoa Atoll. French authorities initially denied that any mishap had occurred and declared that the tidal wave was of natural origin, but in a subsequent publication they did acknowledged the Mururoa ‘accident’.

  • In 1981 a mission led by French geologist Haroun Tazieff issued a warning about the geological stability of the atoll in the long-term if nuclear weapons testing continued.
  • In 1983, a New Zealand-Australia-Papua New Guinea mission found elevated levels of tritium, and severe fissuring of the atoll and subsidence by more than three feet in parts of the atoll.
  • In 1987, Commandant Jacques Cousteau found short-lived radionuclides such as caesium 134 and iodine 131 in the Mururoa lagoon, indicating leakage from test explosions was already occurring. He filmed spectacular cracks and fissures in the atoll as well as submarine slides and subsidence, which explains to a great extent, the move in 1988 of the largest nuclear tests to Fangataufa atoll.
  • In 1990, a Greenpeace team found radioactivity in plankton 12 miles off the coast of Mururoa. The following year, an International Atomic Energy Agency mission, invited by the French military to counter Greenpeace’s findings, found elevated levels of plutonium in samples taken 12 miles from the atoll.

Apart from its nuclear depository, there has been speculation for some time that the U.S. has a military installation in the Antarctic, conducting such tests, in collaboration with other nations. Research surrounding nuclear test sites and the fall-out of nuclear testing is so highly classified that little could be verified. However, one may draw conclusions from the fact that the U.S. has not endorsed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, leaving the door open to future U.S. testing.

The International Atomic Energy Agency commissioned a study which revealed a significant threat. In the event of a major rock slide, on the north side of Mururoa, the nuclear test cavities previously drilled would become exposed and potentially cause a sudden release of radioactive materials into the southern oceans, affecting Australia and South America.

Scientists from the Institute of Dynamics of Geospheres at the Russian Academy of Sciences have observed that earthquakes can be triggered by human action. “Induced seismicity, or seismic activity caused directly by human involvement, has been detected as a result of water filing large surface reservoirs, development of mineral, geothermal and hydrocarbon resources, waste injection, underground nuclear explosions and large-scale construction projects. If the stress change is big enough, it can cause an earthquake, either by fracturing the rock mass — in the case of mining or underground explosions — or by causing rock to slip along existing zones of weakness.”

One of Europe’s largest research institutes, Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, whose main research fields are in geophysics, seismology and volcanology, are rapidly accumulating and investigating evidence that seismicity is influenced by exogenous factors previously considered insignificant, such as strong distant earthquakes, nuclear explosions, earth tides, changes in the earth’s rotation speed, etc.

According to declassified New Zealand government files, tidal waves have featured in weapons research since WW2. Secret wartime experiments were conducted off the New Zealand coast to create a bomb that would trigger tidal waves. However, the tsunami bomb was never fully tested and the war ended before the project was completed.

Its mastermind was Thomas Leech, the Dean of Engineering at Auckland University (1940-1950). He set off a series of underwater explosions that caused mini tidal waves at Whangaparaoa, north of Auckland, in 1944 and 1945. Details of the research, known as Project Seal, are contained in documents (some six decades old) released by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Based on these facts we could draw one of three conclusions.

  1. Either induced seismic activity triggered the first quake, experienced off southern Australia on December 24th, which directly caused the changes that led to the Sumatra quake and the Asian tsunami; or
  2. Repeated nuclear testing could have induced changes that indirectly led to the earthquake; or
  3. Mother-earth retaliated in anger at the constant assaults on her and the tsunami was indeed an act of nature.

Will we ever really know?

The main sources when researching this article have been based on documentational evidence
contained in:

  1. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (Australia),
  2. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
  3. Greenpeace
  4. Annals of Geophysics (Vol 46, N5, 2003)
  5. “Earthquakes Induced by Nuclear Explosions” (by Rodolfo Console and Alexei Nikolaev)
  6. SpaceDaily (Jan 2005)
  7. Sound Waves Monthly (Jan 2005)
  8. “Inventory of Conflict and Environment”, Case Study No. 4 (Mururoa, French Nuclear Test in South Pacific).
  9. New Zealand Herald, June 30th, 2000 – “Tsunami bomb, NZ devastating war secret”.
  10. International Atomic Energy Agency, public information document (Mururoa)
  11. Istituto Nazionale Di Geofisica e Vulcanologia – “Generated Electromagnetic Discharges on the Seismic Regime”.
  12. Dept. Applied Geophysics, University of Berlin
  13. “Earthquakes Induced by Underground Nuclear Explosions” by I Pasechnik
  14. Extracts from a report to the US Environmental Protection Agency entitled “Earthquake Hazard Associated with Deep Well Injection” by C Nicholson and RL Wesson,
  15. “Seismicity in the Oil Field” as published in Oilfield Review (Spring 2000) — a project report compiled by Schlumberger and the Institute of Dynamics of Geospheres at the Russian Academy of Sciences for the Ministry of Fuel and Energy of the Russian Federation.
  16. Atomic Scientist (Nov/Dec 1998)
  17. Reuters (Jan 2005) – “Global Tsuami”
  18. Australian Government – Geoscience Australia
  19. The Independent (Sep 9, 1995) – Interview with Director of the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences (UK).
  20. Reuters (Nov 2004) – “Beachings in Tasmania”
  21. New York Times, March 2005 – “Senate votes on drilling in Arctic”
  22. Acoustic Ecology Institute
  23. 17 Hours of recorded television news highlights and interviews between December 26 and January 10 following tsunami.

In closing, I need to add a footnote: As a published writer and journalist I was somewhat taken aback at the media’s response when I initially approached them with this article in early February this year. London’s press felt it was pure speculation, American media said it was sensationalist paparazzi style trash – regardless of the documentation evidence.


Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”

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