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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.
1 and 3/22 miles.
I don't exactly know where we're going with this.
We tried, we even have the metric conversion act of 1975. There are simply too many people who resist change and can't do the math in their head. I understand the difficulties with Fahrenheit to Celsius, but it isn't hard to multiply a pound by 2.2. You can even round it to 2 if you had to.
I used to work in a factory that was owned by a German company, but located in the US. If I would give a drawing labeled in milimeters to our machinists they would balk at it, and I would have to go back and convert it to inches. We had a visiting machinist from Germany and I accidentally gave him a drawing in milimeters to use with our mill which was in inches. Realizing my mistake I offered to correct the drawing. He simply asked what the conversion was. I told him 25.4 mm/in and he came back a little while later with a perfectly machined part.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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!"
Surely the size of the wave should be measured by the VOLUME of the water displaced, rather than the height.
This one was confined in a bay at its source, so it was very high, but I'll bet the Boxing day 2004 tsunami involved a lot more water, whether you measure it in litres or hogsheads.
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.
Ease of conversion? Are you kidding? It's no easier to convert in either system, unless you only can do math in your head at the moment. Then the metric system has the advantage. If you have some sort of calculator (y'know, most of the time), it's dead easy either way.
Ease of communication doesn't cut it, either. By your logic, we should all be using the same language, and cursing out those heathens who refuse to abandon the language that they're used to. Yet we're not... we accept that people do things in their own way, and when we work with each other, we have to make some adjustments. Ease of communication is quite possibly the worst argument anyone has ever given for the metric system, since we have far greater barriers with language.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
What's really scary about La Palma is that somebody with a hefty nuclear weapon might be able to actually trigger the landslide. If I was a bad guy with a decent sized nuke, I wouldn't waste it trying to sneak it into the US. I'd just blow up the Cubre Vieja fault and let the wave do the work for me. Somebody really should be watching that island.
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.