It was 3:00 p.m. on Christmas day, 2004 when Stuart Weinstein's pager buzzed in the operations room at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. Seismic waves from an earthquake off the coast of northern Sumatra had activated a seismometer in Australia. Initial readings said magnitude 8.0.
His colleague Barry Hirshorn, a geophysicist, rushed into the control room. His pager had gone off too. Together, they scrambled to locate the epicenter of the quake. In the Indian Ocean, it was early morning, December 26.
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