At 00:58 UTC on 26 December 2004, about 1,300 km of the Sunda megathrust ruptured off western Sumatra in a magnitude 9.1 earthquake, the third largest ever instrumentally recorded. The seabed heaved by metres and lifted the ocean above it. On the nearest coast, in Aceh, the water reached 50.9 m and arrived within fifteen minutes; across the rest of the Indian Ocean it took hours, yet still killed. Around 227,899 people died in 14 countries, from Indonesia to Somalia, making it the deadliest tsunami in recorded history.
The Indian Ocean had no tsunami warning system; the Pacific had run one since 1949, but its sirens had no counterpart here, and the wave outran the news. The disaster built today's Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System, stood up in 2005 to 2006. For insurers it remains the textbook case of a peril whose loss of life dwarfed its insured loss: it struck largely uninsured economies, so the human catastrophe barely registered on the balance sheets that price catastrophe, the starkest protection gap in the modern record.