What might be some of the long-term environmental effects of the earthquake and tsunamis?
Precious coral reefs and mangrove areas would have been crushed by the huge tsunami waves that have devastated southern Asia, an environmental and economic setback that could take years to reverse. On land, wildlife officials in Sri Lanka expressed surprise that they found no evidence of large-scale animal deaths from the tsunami – indicating that animals may have sensed the wave coming and fled to higher ground. An Associated Press photographer who flew over Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park in a helicopter saw abundant wildlife, including elephants, buffalo and deer, and not a single animal corpse, even though the tsunami uprooted trees, toppled cars and destroyed a hotel. Did the earthquake really affect the Earth’s rotation? Yes. This quake was strong enough to affect the Earth’s rotation slightly. It also redistributed Earth’s mass, moving the North Pole 1 inch and causing the length of a day to shrink permanently by 3-millionths of a second, according to geophysicist Richard Gross o
