Tsunami

Photo by Kyodo in National Geographic

Following the earthquake of March 11th in Japan, 10m high tsunami waves created this magnificient whirlpool effect off the coast of Oarai.


Out of curiosity the word tsunami comes from the Japanese, composed by two han characters: 津 (tsu) meaning harbor and 波 (nami) meaning wave. 
The word was commonly adopted by both cientific and civil societies. Only few other lanuguages have its own word for the giant waves phenomena, curiously being native languages of places where tsunamis happened, such as: aazhi peralai - Tamil (India & Sri Lanka), beuna - Achenese (Malaysia & Polinesia), alon - Tagalog (Philipinnes), smong and emong - Defayan and Singulai (Indonesia).
Far from the far east, maremoto - Portuguese (Portugal), where a 8.6 (Richter) earthquake and tsunami destroyed nearly half of the capital Lisbon, in 1755, killing about 60.000 people.

Copper engraving showing the destruction of Lisbon after 1755 event