Tsunami flooding Japan - Arabstoday Oregon Offshore lies a fault that in centuries past has triggered large earthquakes—and tsunamis that swamped the coast. These houses at Cannon Beach sit just inside an evacuation zone based on a worst-case scenario. As the world\'s coasts get more crowded, geologists are finding that tsunamis occur more often than once thought.JapanMore than 1,500 people died last March in Rikuzentakata, one of several towns eradicated by the tsunami. \"As the buildings were destroyed, black, dusty smoke was thrown up,\" a survivor told an Al Jazeera reporter. \"Then the tsunami swallowed up the smoke.\"Black with muck scoured from the harbor, the first tsunami wave pours over a seawall in Miyako, carrying vans and boats. Japan\'s defenses were no match for waves far higher than scientists had predicted.As waves battered the disaster-readiness center in Minamisanriku, ten people—including Mayor Jin Sato—survived by clinging to handrails and a radio antenna.Something always draws people back to the sea—and to facsimiles thereof. At the Summerland wave pool in Tokyo last August hundreds of fun seekers found relief from a hot afternoon and from months of tragic news.Splash of the CenturyIn the fall, brown alders along the shore of Lituya Bay, Alaska, still trace the path taken in 1958 by the tallest tsunami ever recorded. When an earthquake dropped some 40 million cubic yards of rock from the bare slope in the background into the head of the fjord, the splash surged 1,700 feet up the opposite hillside—higher than the Empire State Building. As the wave barreled toward the mouth of the bay, where it was still more than 25 feet high, it flattened millions of conifers, which have since been replaced by alders. It killed two people on an anchored boat.IndonesiaA U.S. Marine helicopter loaded with food flies over Lampuuk in northern Sumatra on January 4, 2005, nine days after a tsunami killed most of the village\'s 7,000 residents—and some 230,000 people on coastlines around the Indian Ocean. Many locals believe divine intervention saved the Rahmatullah mosque.In March 2005 a second earthquake off Sumatra unleashed only moderate waves—but lowered the land in some coastal areas by three feet, triggering flooding. On Pulau Balai, Rahmaniar, 23, still walks on coral chunks she used to raise her home\'s floor above the tides.A fault that runs under Puget Sound could cause a damaging earthquake in Seattle—seen here from a boat floating above the fault—and a tsunami that would strike the waterfront in less than ten minutes.SumatraA diorama in the Aceh Tsunami Museum in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, dramatizes the moment on December 26, 2004, when a tsunami struck the city. Before that date, few people in Banda Aceh had even heard the word \"tsunami.\" Now nearly everyone in the city can tell a story of survival and loss.IndonesiaAs night falls and the tide rises on the Indonesian island of Pulau Balai, off the west coast of Sumatra, more than an inch of water washes into the home of 20-year-old Busrani. In March 2005 a seafloor earthquake lowered the island by three feet. Busrani can\'t afford to raise his floor, which floods at every high tide.