Earthquake to Tsunami to Hysteria?

first of all, please know that I care about the citizens of Japan. I hope the world comes together to help them (as we should in any natural disaster).

So I wake up this morning, and me, worried about the chance of a flooded basement, turn on the Weather Channel on TV. There I first hear about the chance of a Tsunami resulting from a significant (M8.9) quake in Honshu, Japan. So I quickly flip to other channels on the tube and find CNN has gone to commercial and I won't even bother with the local stations since I am sure they are reporting on the flooding.

I turn on my laptop to get some web info.

Links

http://www.weather.gov/ptwc/

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/

and then, in anticipation of the waves I 'googled' hawaii cams to see if I could some live action of what was predicted to occur in minutes.

All during this, the Weather Channel gave the most (sensational) coverage. I guess I could have changed to Fox News for that.

(now, one hour later 9:15 EST, the other news networks are getting on the bandwagon) So I need to soften my critique of the weather channel. good work Stephanie!

In any case, you may want to stay clear of the area until things get back to normal. And my thoughts go out to people impacted by this disaster.

a teaching moment

While certainly NOT a fun topic, the current seismic activity in the Pacific is causing some problems in the world. (see http://earthquake.usgs.gov/). Amazing thing is how much the announcements let the folks on the North American west coast know they are out of harm's way, when countless deaths can be directly attributed to the Tsunami. In class this morning, I tried to link to some other tsunami website, but can imagine the heavy traffic looking for the same info.