The Asian Tsunami: A Protective Role for Coastal Vegetation -with graphic details

The graphics here shows how far the tsunami waves penetrated in areas where there were no coastal vegetation.

Take a look at the image. Dark green shows dense costal forest/tree cover. Light green shows open tree vegetation. Blue with dots show inundated regions, and red shows damaged regions.

There is NO overlap between the greens, and the red and blue. Basically, the costal forest areas suffered almost no damage.

The data speaks for itself. (Science, Vol 310, Issue 5748, 643)