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The Largest Recorded Tsunami Was 50 Years Ago
An anonymous reader writes "July marks the 50th anniversary of the world's largest tsunami — a 1,720-foot-tall wave in Lituya Bay, Alaska. It was triggered by a chain reaction of events that began with a magnitude 7.7 earthquake on the Fairweather Fault, which dislodged a rock fall of 40 million cubic yards, that fell 3,000 feet and splashed into the northwest end of Lituya Bay to generate the wave. This article includes survivor accounts, maps, a satellite image, and photos taken right after the event." To be fair, eyewitness accounts put the height of the wave as it came toward their boats at perhaps 100 feet. The tsunami scoured the land of vegetation and soil to a height of 1,720 feet above sea level, however.
I live in the 21:st century, you insensitive clod!
Not sure why they bothered making this article, as eventually the Doctor will come along and in the process of defeating some alien menace will cause the tsunami to never have happened.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
In the News section? How is something that happened in 1958 "news"?
Anyway, I find it interesting that the world's largest tsunami hit Alaska around the time it became a state. Does anyone know how this played into the politics of the day?
My blog
wouldn't it have scoured the land higher up than 1,720 ft? Seems to me that with as much force as it had, the wave would be smaller and would wash up the land devastating everything in its wake. Would all the eyewtinesses be that consistently far off in their estimations?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
There was a scary program on UK TV a few years back talking about the possibility of something similar happening in the canary islands that would wipe out the eastern seaboard of the US - a little research seems to suggest this is greatly overhyped however.
This sig all sigs devours
states they where on 5 fathoms = 30 feet of water, the wave was 100 feet high (I'm guessing the guy means 100 feet above normal level) so that makes the wave 130 feet (40 m.) That is one fudging big wave, but its far from 1725 feet (525m.) high - its far more likely that the 130 feet of wave being pressed up the small valley will have so much force it will keep climbing up to that level.
Stupid ethnocentric bastard. On another culture's website, expect to hear that culture's units of measurement.
US-based website == US units of measurement.
I don't complain when I have to convert from metrics to imperial.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
This is a science article, right? Use SI units, kdawson.
1720 ft = 524.25 m
40 E 6 yard^3 = 30.58 E 6 m^3 = 0.03 km^3
3000 ft = 914 m
100 ft = 30.5 m
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
100 ft wave?!
Parp!
Actually, it is not stupid. It is deliberate U.S. government corruption. The corrupters didn't want people to be able to understand easily the cost of something per unit of volume or weight.
Where was Bodhi for THAT wave?
In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the c
"a 1,720-foot-tall wave in Lituya Bay, Alaska." ... skip a few... "To be fair, eyewitness accounts put the height of the wave as it came toward their boats at perhaps 100 feet. The tsunami scoured the land of vegetation and soil to a height of 1,720 feet above sea level, however."
There is "fair" and then there is CORRECT. This write up was NOT correct. It was a sloppily written "summary" that should have been rejected for "containing too much BS". Makes me yearn for the days when all /. submitters did was plagiarism by copying and pasting the first paragraph or so.
The bad writeup aside, it is an interesting article to read.
There are only two things I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures... and the Dutch.
Nobody needs exactly 1/3 of a meter, you must mean approximately. That would be 33cm.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Typically, we don't use wooden sticks when exact measurements are required.
the 11 km (36,200 ft, 36,2 kft?) waves of the Mariana Trench.
http://www.google.com/search?q=1720+foot+in+meters
cool. What device do you use to measure out exactly 33.3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 cm?
I don't complain when I have to convert from metrics to imperial.
That's because Metric Starfleet sounds quite lame.
that if this had happened during the period of Russian Alaska then tsunami would have recorded you.
There is nothing inherently superior about the metric system.
Sure there is. Ease of unit conversion and ease of communication with the REST OF THE FREAKING WORLD. We live in a global economy - we should start acting like it.
Why does dividing by 10 matter so much, anyway? Because you have 10 fingers?
Because we use a base 10 counting system for most calculations. Having a measurement system that is highly compatible with the numeral system most humans use makes sense.
Really, we should be trying to move to a system of measure that is base 2.
Really? Go ahead and tell your mother you came 1011 miles to see her - I'm sure she'll be impressed.
All your base are belong to us! Sega had the right answer to the wrong question.
I think, after reading the article a bit They get that 1720 foot wave from the location directly across the water from the rock slide that stripped vegetation to an elevation of 1720 feet.
"The spur of land between Gilbert Inlet and Lituya Bay that received the full force of the wave. Trees and soil were stripped away to an elevation of 1720 feet above the surface of Lituya Bay. Photo by D.J. Miller, United States Geological Survey."
You even get a picture.
"...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive...it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
Hands up who thought that was a Russian water tentacle!
What device do you use to measure 25 cm?
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
This type of tsunami is the exact same as what is predicted will ultimately wipe out most of the Eastern Seaboard. It will make Katrina and even the tsunami that hit in the Indian Ocean look like a cake walk. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/aug/10/science.spain
Go Illini!!!
The photos from the following day are impressive, but I'd like to compare it to what it looks like today: How much has been able to regrow in relatively cold climate in 50 years?
Relax man. I was semi-joking. And while I respect other cultures, I don't respect outright stupidity or cruelty. It's for the same reason that when I would go to vacation in Saudi-Arabia, I wouldn't treat my wife like shit that the imperial system sucks in a decimal system.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
I wonder if there were any thoughts at the time relating the tsunami with the russians?
I mean it was during the cold war and people back then didn't have access to much information as we do now...
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
I'd prefer that we used a hexadecimal system.
And how do you propose we convince every non computer geek in the world that this is a good idea? Further are you going to pay for the math classes virtually everyone will need?
Your idea fails the mom test miserably...
I find it funny that someone who is clamouring for scientific units has the wrong number of significant digits in their conversion.
1720 ft has at least 3 and at most 4 significant digits. So your converted number should be 524 m or 524.3 m. Converting to 524.25 m is incorrect, as it implies more accuracy than the original number does.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
You are right.
I know. Thank you.
Since the global economy is already using a common language and common currency, it makes perfect sense to use common units.
By that you of course mean the most important reserve currency and the world languages. Nice to know you support my assertion.
You go ahead and pay $4 for a liter and I'll pay $4 for a gallon, that fact alone is reason enough to stick with US measurements.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
At what point do we call something a wave instead of a really friggin huge splash?
This comment is nothing to do with the Tsunami, but then neither are most of the others, so I'll risk going Offtopic. /. is US-centric and as it is American I guess that's fair enough, but as some 40% of /.ers are not, I think a bit of international understanding is called for to stop all this bickering. We all like the same thing (/.) after all.
Firstly, (I'm a Brit by the way)
Secondly, re measurement, the article, based largely on contemporaneous accounts, used Imperial measures, not metric, so learn to live with it. I grew up with metric and imperial measures and am fortunate enough to be able to switch between them quite easily, and even use them together which can be confusing!
Nasa, on the other hand...
Smivs on the intertubes!
333.333333 millimetres
or
333333.333 micrometres
or
333333333 nanometers if you need a round number.
Not.that.hard.
"Grandma, I walked eleven miles to see you."
The funny thing about non base-10 number systems is that our language can't say them without spelling them out. The old joke about "There are 10 kinds of people in the world..." isn't very funny if you say it aloud or in your head: "There are two kinds of people in the world" or "There are one zero kinds of people in the world".
So I believe it's our language, not our fingers, that makes base ten feel natural. If we had grown up accustomed to counting "one two three ten eleven twelve thirteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three thirty" then base four would feel natural. The characters "2506" would look as strange as hexadecimal and be as impossible to pronounce without spelling or conversion.
By the way, isn't the term "base 10" devoid of meaning? If our system were base four, then "base 10" would mean "base four" since the characters "10" in base four mean "4" in base ten. Whatever base you use, "10" is your way of writing the value of that base.
Back to the tsunami, it's disappointing to hear that the water was 290 fathoms high only very near it's source (the landslide). That's like saying "Your mama's so fat she jumped in the Pacific and made a tsunami a billion nanometers high."
Where's the satellite picture of the scene before the earthquake?
This whole thing sounds like hogwash to me. Not the facts, but the reporting. First, they take the splash damage size as the wave height, even though one sentence later it's acknowledged that wasn't the case. And two, this isn't a Tsunami at all. It's a huge wave, certainly, but it's not a Tsunami. Among other things, you don't notice Tsunamis as huge waves on a boat - that's where the whole name comes from ("big wave at the harbour") - because japanese fishermen came home from the sea, hadn't noticed anything unusual, and found the entire village devastated.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
US-based website == US units of measurement
But the *Imperial* measurement system is a legacy of the former colonial masters and oppressors! It's time to throw off those British made 5/32" shackles forever!
But metric is no good (cheese eating SM's etc.). A hex-based system would be OK but it would be nice to have at least as many fingers as digits. The best compromise is surely an Octal based counting and measuring system. If the thumbs are used for the 8's digit you can then count up to 23 or even 31 (depending on exact thumb useage) without using toes or other appendages!
I'm not installing a new system until time and angle measurments get upgraded to base 10.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
OK, when I saw the 1700 ft figure I suspected something was wrong. AFIK, it would take an unbelievable amount of energy to support a mountain of water that high. (Where's frink when I need it?) Even 100 ft indicates a huge amount of energy. It makes total sense if that amount of energy meeting the solidly-planted continental uprising would be re-directed in the direction of least resistance (in this case upslope) until it is dissipated.
The questions that come to mind are things like: How fast was it traveling? Over what area from the epicenter did it travel? What was the actual water level above ground as it rushed upslope? If I ws on the 5th story of a hotel in the water's path, would I have been able to safely watch? Would the hotel have be able to survive the shock if were made out of concrete? (or sticks? or straw?) How much salt was left behind? (The '64 earthquake dropped the level of Cook Inlet by about 40 feet in some places. [That would be 12.192 meters for those of you who are English-unit challenged.] This caused massive salt-water infusion that killed off vegetation for miles inland on parts of the Kenai Peninsula.) How would I model something like that?
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Wait, you mean it wasn't caused by global warming? Blasphemy!
Also, I saw somebody else make a comment concerning the metric system. I'm also an American, and I too would prefer we switched to the metric system. Who decided to base a mile on 5,280 feet, with a foot being twelve inches, I'll never know. But it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
60 Hot bath
If you can get in a 60C/140F bath you are either one tough or one scalded individual.
It's a Rube Goldberg disaster.
I write bullshit
If you look at the map, the location of the little disaster is something like a harbor. Narrow confines. Sloping ground. It is unusual in that the ground disruption happened inland and the wave propagated to the sea but the mechanics are the same.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Answer: because 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Dumb troll!
So is anyone going to actually discuss the tsunami, or are we going to bang our heads together on a mile-long board until the end of metric time?
I find it interesting that the wave was only 100 feet high in the eyewitness accounts, but that it washed 1700 feet of vegetation off. I wonder if the shape of the land surrounding the bay somehow compressed the wave much like a levee does a flood.
. . . of how small and feeble we are in comparison to Nature. . .
What?
In deep water, the wave is much smaller. In open ocean, so small as to be undetectable without instrumentation.
As the wave reaches shallow water, it sloshes up. It is "pressed up", it's a displacement effect rather than a surface wave.
I don't see anything misleading about it. It seems to me like a 100-foot wave could easily run up to 1700 feet on an incline if the wave has enough momentum. All that water moving at such a high speed isn't just going to stop when it hits the short unless the shore is a vertical wall of stone. So it's going to slosh up the incline until it decelerates to zero.
You can see this effect yourself by putting a four-year-old in a bathtub and instructing him to make waves by sliding back and forth in the tub. Although the wave height will never exceed the height of the tub, the water will go over the side and get the floor very wet. (OK, no one told me to do it, but it was great fun until Mom caught me.)
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Could you trigger a massive rockfall off of, say, Taiwan or Hawaii, aimed (more or less) in the direction of your arch-enemy and wipe them out? Perhaps drill a core every 100 meters, plant explosives down the shaft, explode, profit!
I've been to Lituya Bay. I've walked its shores. I managed to lose a crab pot there. I've talked with one of the survivors. Lituya Bay is a protected harbor used by fishing boats to get out of the weather. I used the harbor to protect myself and a 38' fishing boat from 105 mph winds one summer (1967). There is a very narrow passage to get into the harbor. You have to line up to lights (night) or white sticks (day) and traverse between a large sandspit and the shore. In the middle of the bay is an island. It contains ruins of an old French fur trapping venture. At the back of the bay is a glacier. When the earthquake struck a piece of the glacier broke off and entered the bay, quickly, causing a huge wave. The wave rushed away from the back of the bay, washed over the island, and washed several fishing boats over the sandspit into the Gulf of Alaska, snapping their anchor chains easily.
You can see that this was no ordinary 'tsunami.' The wave did not come from the sea, but from the shore and moved outward. take a look on Google Earth and you will see what I mean. 58*37'52" North, 137*36'03" East.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Let's say I throw a large rock in the water; some water is splashed up 30 feet in the air, but the waves that travel outward are only about a foot high. Does that splash count as a 30 foot high wave? I think most people would say no, a splash is different from a wave. This is the same thing that happened at Lituya bay, only on a much, much larger scale.
Could this be what happened at Tunguska? Reading that page and looking at the photos, it seems very similar to what I know of the Tunguska Event, whose cause (or nature) is, as far as I can tell, still anyone's guess. There are nearby water sources at the Tunguska "impact" site. I don't have any knowledge of geology whatsoever, and my memory is a bit sketchy, so I have no clue how likely anything like what I'm suggesting is. But hopefully there's someone on here who does know what they're talking about and is willing to talk some sense into me. So, please, go ahead.
What device do you use to measure to over 50 significant digits in any measuring system?
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
To heck with that. I want base 13, so that 6x9=42 like it's supposed to be!
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
I live in a nearly 100% metric country (New Zealand) and I definitely like metric because it's very nice (and much more reliable) to simply be able to move a decimal point when calculating things. But some of the imperial system does actually have some logic behind it, especially with operational things, and you'll often find that the most popular units are optimised in one way or another for use with values that are very common in day-to-day life, as much today as 100 years ago.
Counting in dozens is a great example, because 12 is divisible by so many more factors than 10, which makes it much easier to divide up 12 eggs or whatever. 12 easily divides by 2, 3, 4 and 6 and then 4 and 6 will divide further. 10 only divides by 2 and 5, and neither of those numbers is very flexible after that. I also sometimes find it awkward that metric doesn't promote any natural measure between about 1 cm and 1 m. I hate explaining distances using feet, but for distances or lengths that fall into a certain category, it's often just simpler to say 1 foot than 30 centimetres or 0.3 metres.
What I think would be interesting is a metric system that was built around something like base 12 instead of base 10. The obvious down side of that is that it'd probably be much more difficult to collectively get people to switch bases than to simply switch between imperial and metric.
A black man's weenie?
or 143 nanometres.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
A photo gallery of Lituya Bay today it's a part of Glacier Bay National Park I'm awestruck by how beautiful GBNP is.
A wikimapia of Lituya Bay and a photo gallery from a local tour company, I'd love to go there one day.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"The world's largest wave"?
What the hell are they smoking over at geology.com?
Or are they a National Enquirer subsidiary?
Whatever the case, they have just "awsh@t" their credibility.
me. --a by-product of public education
The metric system lost by a mile in the US.
The Imperial system is too ingrained in the stubborn American psyche.
We don't go to McDonalds and order a 113 gram burger.
If someone gives you a centimeter do you take a kilometer? Do Texans wear 40 liter hats?
Did you read the Bradbury book "234 Celsius"?
Is a gram of prevention worth a kilogram of cure?
Is that little half-pint kid down the block now just a quarter liter?
Does your car get good fuel kilometerage?
etc..etc...
"News: The Largest Recorded Tsunami Was 50 Years Ago"
I've been to France. If they can speak English fluently, they hide it really well.
Only if you arrogantly assume they ought to be speaking English.