Searchers all but gave up hope of finding more survivors from last week's killer earthquake and tsunami today, with authorities saying hat thousands listed as missing were presumed dead. The world has instead turned its full attention to getting food and water to the living.
The official death toll from the disaster is nearing 145,000 after hardest-hit Indonesia added another 14,000 people to the official count. Sri Lanka, India and Thailand said they were almost ready to give up on more than 15,000 still unaccounted for.
The St Stephen's Day tsunami struck the region without any advance notice, and Indonesia announced plans today to work with its Asian neighbours to establish a system to warn coastal communities before potentially deadly waves hit.
Aid workers, meanwhile, were trying to help the millions of people displaced and devastated by the loss of family and friends to put their towns and villages back together.
The extent of the damage became eerily clear as US helicopters carrying aid donated by Singapore flew low over what appeared to be a fishing flotilla off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Some boats were clearly damaged, while others appeared to have emerged from the disaster unscathed. But there was no sign of life at all.
In the low-lying Maldives islands south of India, the desolate scene reminded US Marine Corps Major Max Andrews of war-torn cities in Iraq.
"I was in Fallujah last summer and saw the devastation and damage there. But that was surgical and aimed at specific targets," Andrews - part of a US four-member military-civilian team sent to assess aid needs - said. "Here it's total. Everything is gone."
International donors, meeting this week in Indonesia, have so far pledged about £1 billion, but the destruction of roads, ports and airfields has hampered relief efforts.
Throughout the affected areas, lists of missing increasingly looked like little more than wishful thinking, as officials speeded up the burial of decomposing corpses - many still unidentified - that were piling up in the intense tropical heat.
The challenge of cataloguing the dead was highlighted in Thailand when forensic experts said they were exhuming some 300 tsunami victims - all of them Asian - after discovering they had been mislabelled in the rush to bury bodies in the days following the disaster.
In Indonesia - where the official count of the dead rose to more than 94,000 - at coastal villages such as Kuede Teunom, survivors in mud-caked and tattered clothing grabbed at bottles of water dropped from the air.
As the relief effort continued to build, affected nations were also working to ensure that nothing on the scale of last week's disaster would happen again. Most of the hardest-hit countries, including Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka had no system in place to warn of the impending disaster as is common in the Pacific Ocean.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono gave few details about which countries would be involved in an early warning system or how his impoverished nation would fund it, but regional leaders were expected to endorse the idea during a donors' conference in Jakarta on Thursday.
In Sri Lanka, where the destruction was second only to Indonesia, officials added 1,026 more to the death toll and said 5,540 people still missing were likely to be declared dead, bringing the figure there to 35,000.
Casualty figures were still being reported from affected areas along the country's north and south coasts. Nearly 17,000 were injured and almost one million people were displaced and living in temporary camps at schools and religious places.
In India, authorities expected the toll along that nation's south-east coast to exceed 15,000. More than 5,000 others were dead along Thailand's resort coast, with thousands more missing, and 500 were dead in seven other nations in Asia and Africa.
Reporters were given a look at the wiped-out village of Malacca, on the Indian island of Car Nicobar, where the only structure still standing was a statue of independence leader Mahatma Gandhi. About 4,000 people were missing on India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
In New York, UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said 1.8 million people in tsunami-hit countries would need food aid and that figure could rise. It would take about three days to get food to 700,000 people in Sri Lanka but much longer to reach the 1 million hungry people in Indonesia, he said.
He warned there were still difficulties in reaching survivors in Sumatra's Aceh province.