Emile A. Okal was born in Paris in 1950, and graduated with the Agregation teaching degree from the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1971. He earned an M.S. in Geophysics from Universite Pierre-et-Marie Curie in 1972, and a Ph.D. in Geophysics from the California Institute of Technology in 1978. He taught at Yale University for five years, and has been on the Faculty of Northwestern University since 1984. He has carried research in various aspects of seismology (including quantification of sources, the nature of deep earthquakes, structural studies of igneous provinces), in hydroacoustics (including the origin of iceberg "symphonies"), and in many facets of the science of tsunamis, including theoretical investigations of their generation; he has also participated in or led more than 25 post-tsunami field surveys, including historical ones.

He is a member of the Seismological Society of America, and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union; he served as Editor of Pure and Applied Geophysics (1988-1993), and  Editor-in-Chief of Geophysical Research Letters (1993-1997).

The 2004 Sumatra earthquake was the biggest event in at least 40 years, and its tsunami probably the deadliest in the history of mankind. Six years later, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami were the largest natural disaster in 115 years (and economically probably the largest ever), in Japan. We examine the impact on these and others smaller tsunamis on our knowledge of Earth dynamics, on our approach to tsunami mitigation and warning and we review critically the performance and efficiency of warnings during the smaller tsunamis which have occurred since 2005. While awareness of tsunami hazard has undoubtedly been raised worldwide, and substantial funding appropriated, the development of tsunami centers and the improvement of warning algorithms remains occasionally chaotic, despite significant analytical progress, such as the generalization of W-phase inversions.

We review eleven post-Sumatra tsunamis (from Nias, 2005 to Tohoku, 2011) and assign them a color-coded wisdom index, on a scale from red (bad) to gold (excellent), depending on an [admittedly subjective] evaluation of the performance of mitigation efforts, of the warning centers and of the response of the populations involved. The results are mixed, with a generally positive attitude of coastal inhabitants possessing the reflex of self-evacuation, but a frequent failure of centralized warning centers and government agencies, which in particular, have repeatedly failed to mitigate against, and recognize in real time, the so-called "tsunami earthquakes" characterized by slow rupture and enhanced tsunami generation.