In the Indian Ocean tsunami on December 26, 2004, an estimated 227,898 people died in fourteen countries, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. Three weeks later satellite analysis continued to show the disaster’s magnitude. In this image of part of the western coastline of Thailand, vegetation is dark red and bare earth is gray. On December 31, five days after the waves swept ashore, large sections of the shoreline are gray, stripped of vegetation or covered in mud and sand. It is the long, smoothly curving beaches that were devastated by the tsunami, not the land that juts into the ocean.