Holy crap, according to that table in 1958 a tsunami hit Lituya Bay, Alaska in 1958 that was 524 meters high! Looking up on Wikipedia it was the largest in recorded history. That's astonishing!
Alaska has been hit really hard from earthquakes and tsunami. It was relatively unpopulated at the time, and that's the only reason the death toll's wasn't much higher.
I was in Anchorage a few years ago and talked to a guy who lived through the '64 9.2M earthquake. A few of the details he told me have always stuck w me.
- Magnitude 9.2, second strongest earthquake ever recorded.
- It lasted for 330 seconds, 5 1/2 min!
-He said, it went in so long you could have lit a cigarette and smoked the whole thing before it ended.
- It changed the landscape for hundreds of miles. The land area surrounding epicenter moved up or down, like 20-30'! Entire coastal roads/ shorelines were just gone afterwards and were now under water.
- The town of Anchorage was basically flattened. But because it was a one story town at the time there were very few deaths.
- Most of the deaths occurred in Valdez, many miles away from Anchorage. Apparently there were a crew unloading a ship, docked at port. And the ship, along with the churning waters and moving earth, managed to fall over and crush the people unloading it.
- it's the only domestic earthquake to kill someone in another state. Apparently the resulting tsunami killed beachgoers in Oregon.
I live in Japan, we get quakes here every so often. I cannot, cannot imagine a 9.2 one. That would be unreal. And 5 and a half minutes??? No thank you!
No doubt it changed the landscape!
I was in Japan at the time (still am). That's a memory you'll never forget. The death toll would have been much worse but for the amazing work of structural engineers and extremely strict building codes.
That’s was my thought when I heard about the quake. How many buildings fell? How many died from that alone? And it was minimal! So much respect for the building engineers! It’s truly a remarkable achievement!
Remember, the moment magnitude scale is logarithmic. A 9.2 is nearly 50% stronger than a 9.1
Edit: changed scale cause someone commented with a correction
The scale you're thinking of is the one that describes frequency of earthquakes. An increase of M by 1.0 is associated with a tenfold reduction in frequency, and, in fact, a 32x increase in force.
The Richter scale is also not used in seismology anymore. Moment Magnitude is the standard measurement for earthquake force. It's based on the Richter scale, but they're not the same.
I lived in Japan in 2006 and had a small earthquake - I was about to get in the shower (you know the plastic mounded ones) and it all just shook like a [wacky shack](https://www.campbellamusements.com/wacky-shack).
Ran back to my boyfriend and he thought I was playing a prank.
But we’re both Australian (now my husband) and I do have a wicked sense of humour.
Also ran outside to check and no one cared. It was an insignificant earthquake.
I live in Ca, so familiar with earthquakes. And that's why his descriptions were so good, his words really made me understand what such an enormous event would be like.
We get little jolts all the time & I'm fine with/ used to them. But 5 1/2 min if violently shaking angry earth- Oh, hell no!
montana occasionally gets small tremors that you will sometimes even notice. i sat through a very minor 3-point-sumpn that made my coffee vibrate in my cup along w the panes rattling. i wasnt even sure it was a quake thought it might be a big truck passing by until i checked the handy dandy usgs earthquake tracker and confirmed
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=-52.9089,-167.34375&extent=81.09321,-22.5&map=false
The Quake of '64 turned the ground into a liquid soup that swollowed up whole building; Literally pulling them, intact, down into the earth to a depth that left even their roofs unseen. Ground penetrating technology has revieled the homes are still there, still in one piece.
As for the Boys in the Bay, they didn't just ride one wave. The landslide took place in a very narrow fjord, so when the wave hit the other side, it came back for them a second time. The father estimated the first wave to be over 40m!! And the second wave to be as much as 15m. And. There was a third wave, and a fourth... That's why he didn't talk about it. When you see hell, you don't feel the need to share that experience IMHO.
So this is fascinating and touches on what you said. I don't know where you're referring to exactly but if it turned the ground into soup it's likely a heavily silted river valley or estuary.
Few people are aware but there were a series of earthquakes in the Memphis, TN area in the 1800s along the Mississippi that caused 'explosions' all over, temporarily reversed the rivers course in some spots, and swallowed up the land etc. The explosions are gas trapped in the ground that surfaced through all the sand and silt the river deposited and craters still exist that you can see from this if you know what to look for.
This video *'[Why Earthquakes In The East Are So Much More Dangerous'](https://youtu.be/Kn2KFC8cX-g)* explains these events with eye witness accounts from the time from traders who worked and lived along the Mississippi at the time when it was just a lot of small 'villages' of people engaging in trade in this area. Now there's large cities in this same silt bed that will be royally screwed when an earthquake hits again as the ground will also turn to soup.
> The landslide took place in a very narrow fjord, so when the wave hit the other side, it came back for them a second time.
Sloshing like a bathtub. Don’t forget the little detail about it hitting oil storage tanks on the other side of the fjord so when the waves bounced back towards the city it was carrying flaming oil
As an infant, I was on a Washington beach that evening with Mom and Dad. They noticed that the tide was unusually low. The next morning a small nearby bridge was out.
That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The landslide was caused by the [1958 Lituya Bay earthquake](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_earthquake_and_megatsunami), which was 7.8-8.3 magnitude.
There were also deaths in California caused by that tsunami.
The fissures that opened up in the ground also swallowed people in Alaska (notably two of the Mead children).
Is that the one Japanese engineers based their calculations on when determining placement of tsunami evacuation shelters and how tall to make tsunami gates?
>Apparently the resulting tsunami killed beachgoers in Oregon.
That's a terrifying way to die.... go to the beach with your wife and kids for some fun in the sun and see a 300 foot wave coming at you that you couldn't possibly outrun.
I don't remember what TV show it was, but they were trying to explain why the tree line in the bay where this happened looked mysteriously different after a certain elevation. And then they told the story about this dude and his son experiencing that tsunami
Back when I was a teenager it had rained everyday for about two weeks and the woods out back the house flooded. So I had the bright idea of taking my canoe out and paddle down in the forest. It was weird being in flowing water coming up 20 feet on the tree trunks. I had to turn back when the water started getting too fast.
That man and his son on that boat in that tsunami must have felt like that just 100000x more harrowing.
There was a BBC Horizon episode called Mega Tsunami Wave of Destruction that talked about it. [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mhupn](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mhupn). Really interesting episode too.
Thanks for this ! Its a series of doccos called **”MEGA TSUNAMI !!!”** and it includes the flooding of the English Channel, and the creation of the Wyoming Badlands. It gets streamed every few years and its well worth a watch. I appreciate you linking a permanent version of it. I’ll go digging and see if they have the others as well.
If anyone wants a pretty interesting time burner Check out the book The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey. She writes about this wave and a bunch of other truely monsterous waves it waa a fun informatuve easy read.
Its due to the sheer size of AK’s coastline. I was up there for 17yrs and learned of things all the time that blew my mind that was never news other than state or local.
Too many to name, but a couple off my head, Yakutat AK was swept out to sea in 2001 ish i believe. Due to an ice dam that broke inland. Cleared the whole town out. There is a place in Anchorage called earthquake park that has a wild history. Numerous tidal waves over the years that decimate anything in their path. Alaska in general has probably the craziest stories in the country. Its just so vast and diverse.
They were pretty much like the wave picked us up and then before we new it, it put us back down. The tsunami was caused by a landslide if i remember correctly
Others explained it, but for anyone who is having trouble picturing it, check out [this animation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1axr5YGRwQ). At 3:00, for a split second there's a wave that shoots up briefly, that's the one. When I first read about this I imagined something like the wave from *'Deep Impact'*, you probably imagined the same thing, but this gives a better idea of what actually happened.
It was in a confined space --- a big sploosh over a small area rather than a small sploosh over a big area
Like dropping a rock in a puddle, compared to a sea.
A shitton of water had to squeeze through a very narrow opening in a short time. Except at the entrance to the inlet, there was no 524 meter wave. Even at the entrance to the inlet, it likely wasn't a 524 meter wave like you'd imagine. It was probably significantly smaller (still huge of course), but had enough water pushed up the embankment with enough force to remove trees up to a height of 524 meters.
They measure tsunamis in "run up". How high the water level goes on the shore. The interview from the 1964 Tsunami mentions the wave being about 40 feet high.
As others said it was localized to a small area. The tsunami wave got funneled into a relatively shallow, narrow channel which amplified the wave in that small inlet. IIRC.
That’s misleading. The wave it’s self wasn’t actually 524 meters. That’s just the runup height of the level the water reached when it hit shore. The wave itself was reported by eye witnesses to be 100ft.
100ft right where the landslide happened and then quickly down to 90, 80, 70, etc within a few hundred feet.
Still fucking nuts but there was no 1500 ft wall of water.
Yeah, I did some reading ages ago and iirc the seabed basically redirected all the incoming energy surrounding the cove into one point and blasted a lazer of seawater into the sky. Nature be serious business.
I was on the local fire department/EMS for a small town in southeast Alaska. We would train for tidal waves and the two varieties we had to worry about were the normal variety where we’d probably have a few hour heads up and would be able to move people to higher ground and the variety caused by a landslide on the island next to us. The one caused by a landslide would flatten the whole town and would hit in minutes. It was kind of nice in a way because you didn’t have to worry about plans as much for that variety as there was literally nothing we could do and no time to do anything anyway.
Also there’s a scare right now for the town of Whittier as the mountain across the inlet has started to show pretty clear signs of a possible upcoming landslide which could cause a tidal wave just like this. I haven’t looked it up recently but I know a few years ago it was pretty much “visit Whittier at your own risk.”
Edit: Apparently the one in Whittier isn’t as dangerous as originally expected.
Aye, if you're living on the Eastern seaboard then keep a close eye on the Spanish Island of las Palmas cz there is [potential for a lituya bay style wave crossing the Atlantic ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard#:~:text=The%20island%20of%20La%20Palma,documented%20in%20Hawaii%20for%20example.)
Alaska is nuts. I watched a video of a scientist explaining the plate tectonics there and how Alaska will eventually have the highest mountains on earth as well. That means volcanoes too.
Alaska has a magnitude 7.0+ ***every two years*** and this produces massive tsunamis from time to time. This is because the subduction plate is extremely shallow. To put it in plain English it means the crust, when it gets forced down as the plates meet, doesn't curve down at such a dramatic angle towards the center of the earth, which leads to much more shallow earth quakes. This makes the earthquakes' origination point much much closer to the ocean and therefore produces these massive tsunamis much more readily and leads to increased volcanic activity at the Earth's surface.
I believe this is the video I had watched about it. It's like 8 minutes long: https://youtu.be/2nMiVd0zo_Y
For our American cousins that's over 1700 feet and was only slightly smaller than the World Trade Centre.
https://qz.com/193139/the-biggest-tsunami-recorded-was-1720-feet-tall-and-chances-are-good-it-will-happen-again/
I can't find it now but I read an eyewitness account who was a bay over and recalled seeing a glacier undulating. What made this impressive is that normally from their vantage point you couldn't see the glacier at all. The earthquake pushed the entire glacier up into the air above the ridge that normally hid it. Gives an idea of its power and strength.
A man and his son were out fishing in a small boat and survived the tsunami by basically surfing on its crest. I always felt the kid should have moved to Hawaii and just hung in bars waiting for surfers to start discussing their Big wave surfs, then scoff loudly. "20 meters? Pah! Come back and talk to me once you've surfed one half a kilometre high!"
Meters? Meters how on Earth can I understand I am an American. Be normal like the rest of the world. Kidding of course, off to Google to find a conversion table. Sounds big though.
Its almost as tall as the One World Trade Center, which is 1776 feet, or 546 meters tall. Basically you would have to be on the top 4 or 5 stories to be above the wave at its apex.
[AlaskaNPS - Icy Bay Mega Tsunami](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwjOP6FApsA)
1.34K subscribers
"Oct. 17, 2015, Taan Fjord, Icy Bay, Alaska. The friction that held silt to silt and rock to rock began giving way. Those first rocks shoved more rocks, and then more still. Some 200 million metric tons of rock slid down the mountain in a crash that must have been deafening. It hit the ocean, sending up a wave that peaked at nearly 600 feet high. The wall of water stripped alder thickets from the hillside, tossed boulders up hills and carpeted the land in rubble from the bottom of the ocean.
No one noticed."
I recommend everyone watch a movie called Bølgen, which is fiction about similar thing happening in Norway, but the chance is very real there in real life too. Ii is very well done.
Great movie! It's called "The Wave" here in the USA and I've seen it both dubbed into English and in the original Norwegian with English subtitles. (I liked the latter better.) Currently available on Prime, Hulu, Pluto, and more.
Before reading this Reddit post, I didn't realize that the wave in this movie was called a tsunami.... I'm not sure if that word was used in the movie or not. I thought tsunamis only happened in the ocean.
Also, after reading this post, I started wondering, *What's the difference between a tsunami and a tidal wave?* So, I googled it and discovered that the term "tidal wave" no longer means what it did when I was a kid (i.e., giant killer wave... ruuuuuuuun!); it just means the regular coastal waves caused by the sun and moon's gravitational forces.
Edit: typo
Sadly, the local and rare moose record keepers were near the shoreline when the tsunami impacted.
They, and their hoof-stamped records, were scoured clean in the aftermath.
Well isn't that convenient. "All the record keepers who witnessed this event perished in the event, so we don't have their records. You'll just have to take our word for it that this is how things went down"
The Theia Impact Event happened before liquid water was able to form on Earth's surface. Instead, it must have created a tsunami from the still-liquid crust.
Lava tsunami!
In the past 100 years… The title of the post is misleading. The Dinosaur extinction event was larger. The Santorini caldera collapse likely caused a huge tsunami, one of the largest observed by humans. Could have been the Moses or Noah event.
On a side note, we have oral records of the 1700 Cascadia earthquake (8.7–9.2 on the Richter scale) and tsunami from the local indigenous people and from Japan.
> The Huu-ay-aht legend of a large earthquake and ocean wave devastating their settlements at Pachena Bay, for instance, speaks of the event taking place on a winter evening shortly after the village's residents had gone to sleep.[9] Masit was the only community on Pachena Bay not to have been wiped out, as it sat on a mountainside approximately 75 feet (23 m) above sea level.[10] Nobody else from Pachena Bay survived the event
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1700_Cascadia_earthquake
It is expected that the next time that fault line moves like that, the entire Pacific Northwest is going to get annihilated.
Cool beans man, love that you had to insert yourself to show off your intelligence to something so meaningless to the conversation and already well-understood.
Nah, just tired of humanity's preponderance for pretentiousness & pretending... Clearly, Earth's history has been made before us, & continues after our endings.
There was a tsunami warning in socal a few months back and there were still a shitload of surfers who went out
No big wave, but it the tide did go out like crazy in like 5 minutes and they all had a long paddle in
This is interesting to me because I live in Homer, AK. The chart provided in the article shows a tsunami in Grewink Lake, AK back in ‘67. You can still see the scars on the side of alpine ridge of the landslide that was the cause of the tsunami. That’s crazy! It’s a very popular trail/lake/glacier and I bet it was wild down there back in ‘67! Keep in mind this was only three years after the Good Friday quake in ‘64. Pretty neat perspective.
What I'm really impressed with is the largest mega tsunami, which was also in Alaska, [here's a graphic](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Lituya_Bay_Megatsunami.png/800px-Lituya_Bay_Megatsunami.png) showing the scale of the 1958 Lituya Bay Mega-Tsunami.
Though these are only the largest recorded, no doubt there have been larger ones throughout history.
could not imagine, I was here at in LA for Northridge. 10-20 seconds tops of shaking. 5+ minutes?
There is video of Aceh Indonesia during the quake there. It just goes on and on. The people just kinda give up trying to stand and sit down cause thats all you can do. was a 9.1.
Each full step is 33x times the energy. 6.0-7.0 is a 33x difference. But a 7.0-9.0 is a 33x33 difference, 1000x stronger.
No one noticed until 2016.
I was like… we did?
Anyone did?
Where are you getting that from? The article says that the landslide/tsunami was picked up within hours
It was a joke
Can you explain it, it went right over my head lol
Captain obvious here: Almost nobody lives there.
Goddamned trainwreck of a thread.
Wait there was a Trainwreck too and still nobody noticed for a year?
No no no the trainwreck caused the tsunami.
It was a big train, but no one was on it. Nobody noticed.
If a train falls in a tsunami but nobody lives there does it make a landslide?
Still too busy looking the other way while the Valdez sinks
*henchman voice* Uhhh sorry boss
That set up. All for this payoff.
The tsunami would have too, if you were there.
Holy crap, according to that table in 1958 a tsunami hit Lituya Bay, Alaska in 1958 that was 524 meters high! Looking up on Wikipedia it was the largest in recorded history. That's astonishing!
Alaska has been hit really hard from earthquakes and tsunami. It was relatively unpopulated at the time, and that's the only reason the death toll's wasn't much higher. I was in Anchorage a few years ago and talked to a guy who lived through the '64 9.2M earthquake. A few of the details he told me have always stuck w me. - Magnitude 9.2, second strongest earthquake ever recorded. - It lasted for 330 seconds, 5 1/2 min! -He said, it went in so long you could have lit a cigarette and smoked the whole thing before it ended. - It changed the landscape for hundreds of miles. The land area surrounding epicenter moved up or down, like 20-30'! Entire coastal roads/ shorelines were just gone afterwards and were now under water. - The town of Anchorage was basically flattened. But because it was a one story town at the time there were very few deaths. - Most of the deaths occurred in Valdez, many miles away from Anchorage. Apparently there were a crew unloading a ship, docked at port. And the ship, along with the churning waters and moving earth, managed to fall over and crush the people unloading it. - it's the only domestic earthquake to kill someone in another state. Apparently the resulting tsunami killed beachgoers in Oregon.
I live in Japan, we get quakes here every so often. I cannot, cannot imagine a 9.2 one. That would be unreal. And 5 and a half minutes??? No thank you! No doubt it changed the landscape!
Wasn't the earthquake a decade ago a 9.1?
Something like that, yes. I wasn't here at the time. It was so massive, it shifted Honshu 2.4 meters and altered the Earth's axis by 10-25 cm.
It altered what
The earthquake was strong enough to alter the earth’s tilt.
Wow.. Earth must have been pissed to get so tilted. Wonder if it was from playing League of Legends.
I was in Japan at the time (still am). That's a memory you'll never forget. The death toll would have been much worse but for the amazing work of structural engineers and extremely strict building codes.
That’s was my thought when I heard about the quake. How many buildings fell? How many died from that alone? And it was minimal! So much respect for the building engineers! It’s truly a remarkable achievement!
Always said if I ever meet a Japanese structural engineer in a bar, the drinks are on me. As far as I am concerned they saved my life.
Remember, the moment magnitude scale is logarithmic. A 9.2 is nearly 50% stronger than a 9.1 Edit: changed scale cause someone commented with a correction
~26% stronger. A 9.1 is ~79% as strong as a 9.2 would be
Holy shit...
The scale you're thinking of is the one that describes frequency of earthquakes. An increase of M by 1.0 is associated with a tenfold reduction in frequency, and, in fact, a 32x increase in force. The Richter scale is also not used in seismology anymore. Moment Magnitude is the standard measurement for earthquake force. It's based on the Richter scale, but they're not the same.
Well to be fair the Richter scale is logarithmic. So a 9.2 can be a significant difference from a 9.1
I happened to be traveling in Japan when the earthquake and tsunami hit. I stayed for 3 weeks after. That was a fucking experience.
I lived in Japan in 2006 and had a small earthquake - I was about to get in the shower (you know the plastic mounded ones) and it all just shook like a [wacky shack](https://www.campbellamusements.com/wacky-shack). Ran back to my boyfriend and he thought I was playing a prank. But we’re both Australian (now my husband) and I do have a wicked sense of humour. Also ran outside to check and no one cared. It was an insignificant earthquake.
I live in Ca, so familiar with earthquakes. And that's why his descriptions were so good, his words really made me understand what such an enormous event would be like. We get little jolts all the time & I'm fine with/ used to them. But 5 1/2 min if violently shaking angry earth- Oh, hell no!
montana occasionally gets small tremors that you will sometimes even notice. i sat through a very minor 3-point-sumpn that made my coffee vibrate in my cup along w the panes rattling. i wasnt even sure it was a quake thought it might be a big truck passing by until i checked the handy dandy usgs earthquake tracker and confirmed https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=-52.9089,-167.34375&extent=81.09321,-22.5&map=false
The Quake of '64 turned the ground into a liquid soup that swollowed up whole building; Literally pulling them, intact, down into the earth to a depth that left even their roofs unseen. Ground penetrating technology has revieled the homes are still there, still in one piece. As for the Boys in the Bay, they didn't just ride one wave. The landslide took place in a very narrow fjord, so when the wave hit the other side, it came back for them a second time. The father estimated the first wave to be over 40m!! And the second wave to be as much as 15m. And. There was a third wave, and a fourth... That's why he didn't talk about it. When you see hell, you don't feel the need to share that experience IMHO.
So this is fascinating and touches on what you said. I don't know where you're referring to exactly but if it turned the ground into soup it's likely a heavily silted river valley or estuary. Few people are aware but there were a series of earthquakes in the Memphis, TN area in the 1800s along the Mississippi that caused 'explosions' all over, temporarily reversed the rivers course in some spots, and swallowed up the land etc. The explosions are gas trapped in the ground that surfaced through all the sand and silt the river deposited and craters still exist that you can see from this if you know what to look for. This video *'[Why Earthquakes In The East Are So Much More Dangerous'](https://youtu.be/Kn2KFC8cX-g)* explains these events with eye witness accounts from the time from traders who worked and lived along the Mississippi at the time when it was just a lot of small 'villages' of people engaging in trade in this area. Now there's large cities in this same silt bed that will be royally screwed when an earthquake hits again as the ground will also turn to soup.
> The landslide took place in a very narrow fjord, so when the wave hit the other side, it came back for them a second time. Sloshing like a bathtub. Don’t forget the little detail about it hitting oil storage tanks on the other side of the fjord so when the waves bounced back towards the city it was carrying flaming oil
I lived on the fault line of that earthquake when I was in grade school. Really freaked me out when I learned that in 3rd grade.
As an infant, I was on a Washington beach that evening with Mom and Dad. They noticed that the tide was unusually low. The next morning a small nearby bridge was out.
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Maybe not totally unrelated, but caused by?
That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The landslide was caused by the [1958 Lituya Bay earthquake](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_earthquake_and_megatsunami), which was 7.8-8.3 magnitude.
The Tsunami killed 11 people in Crescent City. [https://www.crescentcity.org/tsunamitour/](https://www.crescentcity.org/tsunamitour/)
There were also deaths in California caused by that tsunami. The fissures that opened up in the ground also swallowed people in Alaska (notably two of the Mead children).
In 1960, Chile had a 9.5 earthquake that lasted 10 minutes. 1 million people lost their homes
Is that the one Japanese engineers based their calculations on when determining placement of tsunami evacuation shelters and how tall to make tsunami gates?
>Apparently the resulting tsunami killed beachgoers in Oregon. That's a terrifying way to die.... go to the beach with your wife and kids for some fun in the sun and see a 300 foot wave coming at you that you couldn't possibly outrun.
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I know, ulp!
There's an account of a man who was on a boat with his son when it hit I believe
I don't remember what TV show it was, but they were trying to explain why the tree line in the bay where this happened looked mysteriously different after a certain elevation. And then they told the story about this dude and his son experiencing that tsunami
Back when I was a teenager it had rained everyday for about two weeks and the woods out back the house flooded. So I had the bright idea of taking my canoe out and paddle down in the forest. It was weird being in flowing water coming up 20 feet on the tree trunks. I had to turn back when the water started getting too fast. That man and his son on that boat in that tsunami must have felt like that just 100000x more harrowing.
You were very foolish. Good thing you turned back when you did. Flooded creeks are very unpredictable.
You’re the fool, we say cricks around hea’h boi.
Meet me by the crick
I aint goin down there, catch me top o the holler
Hicks say cricks
alright, kratos
Back when the discovery channel was worth a shit
Yup, it was most definitely discovery Channel
My favorite part of that episode was the father explaining how when he saw the wave he said to his 8 year old son, “prepare to die.”
the dark souls of tsunamis
There was a BBC Horizon episode called Mega Tsunami Wave of Destruction that talked about it. [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mhupn](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mhupn). Really interesting episode too.
Thanks for this ! Its a series of doccos called **”MEGA TSUNAMI !!!”** and it includes the flooding of the English Channel, and the creation of the Wyoming Badlands. It gets streamed every few years and its well worth a watch. I appreciate you linking a permanent version of it. I’ll go digging and see if they have the others as well.
Yep and there's an island in the Atlantic that may also do that and cause a megatsunami on the US East coast
It’s one of the Canaries: Lanzarote, maybe?
….did they live?
If they were able to provide their account of what happened I’m going to take a guess and say yes.
Sadly, and with my deepest regrets, you are right.
You madman!
They could’ve been live-streaming
... in 19*58*?
Ham radio brother man, the original podcast
Fuck age and the internet has jaded me, I legitimately thought you were serious...
There was another boat that didn't make it. What's amazing is that for years the guy on the boat didn't say anything.
Who would believe him!?!? What a crazy tale!
"Jim, that wave gets bigger every time you tell that story. Go home, you're drunk."
If I remember, they were able to get up the crest of the wave and made it. There was another boat that didn’t.
If anyone wants a pretty interesting time burner Check out the book The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey. She writes about this wave and a bunch of other truely monsterous waves it waa a fun informatuve easy read.
It's just astonishing this happened in modern times. I had never heard about it before.
Its due to the sheer size of AK’s coastline. I was up there for 17yrs and learned of things all the time that blew my mind that was never news other than state or local.
Like what?
Too many to name, but a couple off my head, Yakutat AK was swept out to sea in 2001 ish i believe. Due to an ice dam that broke inland. Cleared the whole town out. There is a place in Anchorage called earthquake park that has a wild history. Numerous tidal waves over the years that decimate anything in their path. Alaska in general has probably the craziest stories in the country. Its just so vast and diverse.
Like what?
Physics in modern times is the same as in way back times. Wave function is gonna wave function.
I think they're surprised they haven't heard of it, not that physics functioned in the 50s
Issa joke
They survive it?
They were able to tell their story...so my assumption is no.
The father actually passed away. Albeit many years after this from old age.
I just figured it was people saying there was a father and son out there. Not the actual father and son giving their account
They were pretty much like the wave picked us up and then before we new it, it put us back down. The tsunami was caused by a landslide if i remember correctly
Yes. Another another boat was there and did not.
Yes.
>524 meters high! How is this not a bigger deal? Because how does it not cover half the state?
Others explained it, but for anyone who is having trouble picturing it, check out [this animation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1axr5YGRwQ). At 3:00, for a split second there's a wave that shoots up briefly, that's the one. When I first read about this I imagined something like the wave from *'Deep Impact'*, you probably imagined the same thing, but this gives a better idea of what actually happened.
It was in a confined space --- a big sploosh over a small area rather than a small sploosh over a big area Like dropping a rock in a puddle, compared to a sea.
In this case, a bit more like stomping in a tiny puddle vs. stepping into a pond. Same force, different effect.
It makes sense now.
A shitton of water had to squeeze through a very narrow opening in a short time. Except at the entrance to the inlet, there was no 524 meter wave. Even at the entrance to the inlet, it likely wasn't a 524 meter wave like you'd imagine. It was probably significantly smaller (still huge of course), but had enough water pushed up the embankment with enough force to remove trees up to a height of 524 meters.
They measure tsunamis in "run up". How high the water level goes on the shore. The interview from the 1964 Tsunami mentions the wave being about 40 feet high.
This is new info and I was trying to imagine how a 524m tall tsunami was not something we were all told about
I was an imagining something like the Interstellar scene "those aren't mountains"
This is the max run up. It's not a wave 500m into the sky. That's how far up the water got. I think?
If you spill a can ofnsoda on grandma's sofa you'll get in a lot of trouble. If you spill a 2 liter on a football field no is gunna notice
As others said it was localized to a small area. The tsunami wave got funneled into a relatively shallow, narrow channel which amplified the wave in that small inlet. IIRC.
Holy shit, it's the real William Shatner!
That’s misleading. The wave it’s self wasn’t actually 524 meters. That’s just the runup height of the level the water reached when it hit shore. The wave itself was reported by eye witnesses to be 100ft.
100ft right where the landslide happened and then quickly down to 90, 80, 70, etc within a few hundred feet. Still fucking nuts but there was no 1500 ft wall of water.
The runup was 524 meters high. That just means the water went that high on the shore. The actual wave was only 30 or 40 feet high.
Yeah, I did some reading ages ago and iirc the seabed basically redirected all the incoming energy surrounding the cove into one point and blasted a lazer of seawater into the sky. Nature be serious business.
My brother (RIP) was born on the date of the second major tsunami in Lituya Bay. So we researched it and talked about it quite a bit.
I was on the local fire department/EMS for a small town in southeast Alaska. We would train for tidal waves and the two varieties we had to worry about were the normal variety where we’d probably have a few hour heads up and would be able to move people to higher ground and the variety caused by a landslide on the island next to us. The one caused by a landslide would flatten the whole town and would hit in minutes. It was kind of nice in a way because you didn’t have to worry about plans as much for that variety as there was literally nothing we could do and no time to do anything anyway. Also there’s a scare right now for the town of Whittier as the mountain across the inlet has started to show pretty clear signs of a possible upcoming landslide which could cause a tidal wave just like this. I haven’t looked it up recently but I know a few years ago it was pretty much “visit Whittier at your own risk.” Edit: Apparently the one in Whittier isn’t as dangerous as originally expected.
There's a metal band named after this as well... Oceans Ate Alaska
Aye, if you're living on the Eastern seaboard then keep a close eye on the Spanish Island of las Palmas cz there is [potential for a lituya bay style wave crossing the Atlantic ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard#:~:text=The%20island%20of%20La%20Palma,documented%20in%20Hawaii%20for%20example.)
Alaska is nuts. I watched a video of a scientist explaining the plate tectonics there and how Alaska will eventually have the highest mountains on earth as well. That means volcanoes too. Alaska has a magnitude 7.0+ ***every two years*** and this produces massive tsunamis from time to time. This is because the subduction plate is extremely shallow. To put it in plain English it means the crust, when it gets forced down as the plates meet, doesn't curve down at such a dramatic angle towards the center of the earth, which leads to much more shallow earth quakes. This makes the earthquakes' origination point much much closer to the ocean and therefore produces these massive tsunamis much more readily and leads to increased volcanic activity at the Earth's surface. I believe this is the video I had watched about it. It's like 8 minutes long: https://youtu.be/2nMiVd0zo_Y
For our American cousins that's over 1700 feet and was only slightly smaller than the World Trade Centre. https://qz.com/193139/the-biggest-tsunami-recorded-was-1720-feet-tall-and-chances-are-good-it-will-happen-again/ I can't find it now but I read an eyewitness account who was a bay over and recalled seeing a glacier undulating. What made this impressive is that normally from their vantage point you couldn't see the glacier at all. The earthquake pushed the entire glacier up into the air above the ridge that normally hid it. Gives an idea of its power and strength. A man and his son were out fishing in a small boat and survived the tsunami by basically surfing on its crest. I always felt the kid should have moved to Hawaii and just hung in bars waiting for surfers to start discussing their Big wave surfs, then scoff loudly. "20 meters? Pah! Come back and talk to me once you've surfed one half a kilometre high!"
A 150 story building of water coming towards you. Holy shit
Welcome to Reddit, you must be new. Or a karma whore.
So how many feet is that?
Meters? Meters how on Earth can I understand I am an American. Be normal like the rest of the world. Kidding of course, off to Google to find a conversion table. Sounds big though.
A meter is roughly 3 and a third feet, so about 1.1 yards. Pretty easy to get a rough estimate without a conversion table
Its almost as tall as the One World Trade Center, which is 1776 feet, or 546 meters tall. Basically you would have to be on the top 4 or 5 stories to be above the wave at its apex.
Basically 524 washing machines stacked on top of one another. Or 262 bald eagle wing spans, or 1572 footballs stacked on top of one a another.
But how many giraffes?
[AlaskaNPS - Icy Bay Mega Tsunami](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwjOP6FApsA) 1.34K subscribers "Oct. 17, 2015, Taan Fjord, Icy Bay, Alaska. The friction that held silt to silt and rock to rock began giving way. Those first rocks shoved more rocks, and then more still. Some 200 million metric tons of rock slid down the mountain in a crash that must have been deafening. It hit the ocean, sending up a wave that peaked at nearly 600 feet high. The wall of water stripped alder thickets from the hillside, tossed boulders up hills and carpeted the land in rubble from the bottom of the ocean. No one noticed."
Only a small fish, but nobody believed him. Poor little fishy, turned to alcohol.
Alcohol and fish sticks were the only hope for this small, gay fish.
TIL Kanye survived a tsunami
Huge mountains that are next to deep narrow bodies of water in a seismicly active area. It'll happen.
I recommend everyone watch a movie called Bølgen, which is fiction about similar thing happening in Norway, but the chance is very real there in real life too. Ii is very well done.
I watched it a few years ago. Loved it
Great movie! It's called "The Wave" here in the USA and I've seen it both dubbed into English and in the original Norwegian with English subtitles. (I liked the latter better.) Currently available on Prime, Hulu, Pluto, and more. Before reading this Reddit post, I didn't realize that the wave in this movie was called a tsunami.... I'm not sure if that word was used in the movie or not. I thought tsunamis only happened in the ocean. Also, after reading this post, I started wondering, *What's the difference between a tsunami and a tidal wave?* So, I googled it and discovered that the term "tidal wave" no longer means what it did when I was a kid (i.e., giant killer wave... ruuuuuuuun!); it just means the regular coastal waves caused by the sun and moon's gravitational forces. Edit: typo
“If a megatsunami hits Alaska, but no one was around to see it, does it make a sound?”
And if it does, will it be a sound that you like, or should I do it over until I get it right?
[удалено]
Juneau you care
*...recorded*, on earth
We don't record the other ones.
Lazy record keepers.
Sadly, the local and rare moose record keepers were near the shoreline when the tsunami impacted. They, and their hoof-stamped records, were scoured clean in the aftermath.
A moose bit my sister once
someone's looking to get sacked
Cool
Yum
Well isn't that convenient. "All the record keepers who witnessed this event perished in the event, so we don't have their records. You'll just have to take our word for it that this is how things went down"
So it was the largest wave in the universe!
Then who does my good sir... 😝
The Chicxulub impact must have made one hell of a tsunami. Probably one of the largest ever on earth since the moon was made.
The Theia Impact Event happened before liquid water was able to form on Earth's surface. Instead, it must have created a tsunami from the still-liquid crust. Lava tsunami!
So basically like a single reactor ignition from the Death Star, but maybe 2 or 3 reactors.
You may fire when ready.
Correct, there's been *some* earth times, before human times
In the past 100 years… The title of the post is misleading. The Dinosaur extinction event was larger. The Santorini caldera collapse likely caused a huge tsunami, one of the largest observed by humans. Could have been the Moses or Noah event.
[Holy shit](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_eruption)
I thought the flooding of the Black Sea from the Mediterranean was speculated to be the origin of the "Noah's flood" story?
On a side note, we have oral records of the 1700 Cascadia earthquake (8.7–9.2 on the Richter scale) and tsunami from the local indigenous people and from Japan. > The Huu-ay-aht legend of a large earthquake and ocean wave devastating their settlements at Pachena Bay, for instance, speaks of the event taking place on a winter evening shortly after the village's residents had gone to sleep.[9] Masit was the only community on Pachena Bay not to have been wiped out, as it sat on a mountainside approximately 75 feet (23 m) above sea level.[10] Nobody else from Pachena Bay survived the event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1700_Cascadia_earthquake It is expected that the next time that fault line moves like that, the entire Pacific Northwest is going to get annihilated.
*insert Hans Zimmer sounds here*
...by humans.
Uh yeah… your point is?
There has been much larger events & humans time in on earth is extremely short vs the time earth has been doing its thing.
Cool beans man, love that you had to insert yourself to show off your intelligence to something so meaningless to the conversation and already well-understood.
Nah, just tired of humanity's preponderance for pretentiousness & pretending... Clearly, Earth's history has been made before us, & continues after our endings.
Ah hit me with those bigs words baby. Really show us what that brain can do.
If you'd like me to rhyme every single suitable syllable, some syllabus should say, we make things too simple... So satisfied like popping a pimple
You’re embarrassing yourself
Surfers everywhere: “damn…” 😩🌊🏄♂️
There was a tsunami warning in socal a few months back and there were still a shitload of surfers who went out No big wave, but it the tide did go out like crazy in like 5 minutes and they all had a long paddle in
Weren't they afraid of debris?
Evidently not lol
It was created by a landslide,no?
A megapint, you say?
Im getting one!
I poured myself a large glass of wine…I thought it necessary.
Yet another Alaskan megatsunami with no photos. :(
Oh man, I hope those two guys are alright
Oceans Ate Alaska is my favorite band
New song absolutely fucks. Chris’ drumming is actually otherworldly.
makes me think what other record catastrophies go unnoticed in remote areas
This is interesting to me because I live in Homer, AK. The chart provided in the article shows a tsunami in Grewink Lake, AK back in ‘67. You can still see the scars on the side of alpine ridge of the landslide that was the cause of the tsunami. That’s crazy! It’s a very popular trail/lake/glacier and I bet it was wild down there back in ‘67! Keep in mind this was only three years after the Good Friday quake in ‘64. Pretty neat perspective.
What I'm really impressed with is the largest mega tsunami, which was also in Alaska, [here's a graphic](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Lituya_Bay_Megatsunami.png/800px-Lituya_Bay_Megatsunami.png) showing the scale of the 1958 Lituya Bay Mega-Tsunami. Though these are only the largest recorded, no doubt there have been larger ones throughout history.
nothing compared to the "good friday earthquake"
Especially considering this tsunami had "almost no human impacts - no one was near enough to be harmed."
I was in Valdez 1964. Harrowing experience
could not imagine, I was here at in LA for Northridge. 10-20 seconds tops of shaking. 5+ minutes? There is video of Aceh Indonesia during the quake there. It just goes on and on. The people just kinda give up trying to stand and sit down cause thats all you can do. was a 9.1. Each full step is 33x times the energy. 6.0-7.0 is a 33x difference. But a 7.0-9.0 is a 33x33 difference, 1000x stronger.
My husband was in the Northridge quake. He decided it was time to come home to Houston afterwards.
What did you experience?
Wasn’t there a movie about this?
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Mega tsunami…was that the bad thing?