The cause of the tidal waves that quietly raced across the Indian Ocean at five hundred miles per hour on the 26th of December 2004 was simple.

At 0058 GMT, the Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates located deep below the Ocean moved, jolting the seabed several metres, and displaced hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of water. This caused a series of large waves, or a tsunami, to form and ripple away, looking for somewhere to expend their energy.

At this stage, the waves would be no more than fifty or sixty centimetres high, hardly noticeable as they passed under boats in the open sea. They were noticed when they reached land though, fifteen minutes later in Sumatra, within thirty minutes in the Andaman Islands, ninety minutes in Thailand and two hours later in Sri Lanka before finally running themselves out on the shores of Somalia some seven hours later.

As they enter shallows, approaching land for example, the pace of a tidal wave slows at the front and the water coming in behind rears up, forming a wall that will reach heights of ten metres; the tsunami has reached its destination, though it has some work to do yet.

In low lying places, the waves will push several kilometres inland. When you consider the fact that a cubic metre of water weighs a ton, it is no surprise that the vast quantity smashing ashore on the 26th of December wrecked everything in its path.

As it retreats, it will take much of that which it destroyed back with it. Many people will be carried away and never found, never returned to their families, never confirmed dead: just gone.

The body count is staggering, and rising. More than one hundred and fifty thousand dead in Indonesia, thirty one thousand in Sri Lanka including the worlds worst train disaster with over a thousand people killed. Twenty of the Maldives two hundred and ninety nine islands rendered uninhabitable.

Best estimates now give the number of dead at more than two hundred and fifty thousand, and the number of people made homeless at more than five million.

Many communities, particularly those in the poorer parts of Sri Lanka and Indonesia that relied on the sea for their livelihood, were completely destroyed.

In Thailand, the beach resorts of Khao Lak and Patong were hit hard. Patong, in particular, was lucky. The waves hit just after 9am when the beach, and all the bars behind it, were pretty much deserted; had they arrived twelve hours later and stolen ashore in the night, the bars and restaurants would have been full, the carnage is hard to imagine.

Many small business operators; street traders, bar owners, fishermen have lost everything. Much of the loss will be uninsured; insurance is a thing of the future in the emerging countries of Asia. These people will have to pick up their lives and get on with no help; no loss assessor will trouble them, no cheque will drop through the post in a few weeks to help ease the pain.

The effect of this, one of the world's worst natural disasters ever, has been amazing. Around the world people wanted to help, and the normal person in the street was very quick to donate. At the time of writing, some nine and a half billion dollars in aid has been pledged, much of it in cash from everyday folk who just wanted to do their bit.

The people of Beslan in Russia donated a million rubles, an enormously generous gesture given their recent history.

The British people set a new world record for the most money ever donated in a 24 hour period, 10.7 million pounds, a sum which was to rise to over 200 million and enable the DEC umbrella organisation to wind down its appeal: they actually stopped asking for money!

Within three days the American navy had arrived off the coast of Indonesia, a country with a Muslim population of some 195 million, in order to help the relief effort.

This part of the world has its trouble spots, Sri Lanka, Somalia; Buddhist Thailand shares an uneasy land border with Malaysia. If an early warning system is to be put into place, and that looks very likely now, it will be a project that all countries in the area will need to cooperate on.

The loss of life is appalling, almost unprecedented, and the damage done to one of the poorer parts of the world will take years to repair. If something positive is to come from this, maybe it is the idea that the media on the ground have brought the situation into our living rooms in a way that we have rarely seen; no politics or point scoring, no cheap shot journalism just facts that touched many of us, made us weep, want to help, and to reach into our pockets like never before.

It also had the effect of making disparate cultures, and reluctant neighbours, set aside their differences and work together. If such an event can make traditional enemies see each other, however briefly, in a different light then, surely, that has to be a little brightness emerging from a very dark day?

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