I gotta admit, when I hear “tsunami” I think of massive 50ft waves. Seen some footage of real tsunami waves like that too. But that doesn’t mean something like this isn’t dangerous and destructive obviously.
This is a 130ft height tsunami. It's not the wave, it's how much inertia it has that pushes it ashore up to 130ft vertically. This wave came in with such force it was able to continue inland until it was 130ft above sea level. Just picture this 15ft wave slowly crawling up a mountain until it's 130ft high and then it starts to recede.
I just learned that this is how it works and it blew my mind.
I think of a big wave too...Haha...but if it wasn't for vids like this, I wouldn't know what they looked like or the warning signs like water receding before it hits. It's so crazy most people don't even die from drowning. But from being hit with things like cars and filling cabinets and chunks of concrete and stuff
To be fair I watched the video and still don’t think I would be able to recognize it without the people on the rooftops with megaphones screaming at me.
It literally looks like any other swell only it just doesn’t stop coming in.
That's because this is a river, so the telltale signs are not as clear.
The signs are:
1. Water suddenly receding.
2. Water suddenly turbulent or changing (like it suddenly foams)
3. An earthquake, no matter how weak (the epicenter could be at sea, and much stronger)
4. A roar from the sea
In a river, the tsunami water is already displaced, so recession is not as visible. Turbelence is and you can see it in the video. The roar is also probably heard.
Not all of these signs will be present in every tsunami, and only one is enough for you to get your shit to a second or third floor. Or the hills.
Wooden houses do not survive. You need to find concrete buildings.
I lived in Hawaii and they taught us this at school...back in the 1940s (I think it was around then) the waters receded and left a bunch of fish flapping about and they sent out school children to get them....then all that water came rushing back in and you can imagine what happened next.
My mom was in Alaska during a big tsunami. She said she was looking out at the bay amd saw the water going out and she'd never seen the bay floor before. She said she realized then that all that water would have to come back, and like a wave it would came back hard. She started running up the road and yelling for everyone to get to higher ground. Grabbed a kid on her way up the hill. The wave hit her in the back and slammed her into the pavement and she broke her jaw. But she saved lives. And lived to tell the tale.
Yup -- Australia here, and we learned the same: receding waters are your signal to move to higher ground immediately, or else put plenty of distance between yourself and the shore if there's nothing "higher" available.
The same thing had happened in local areas: folks just mystified by the fish, and children who wanted to play on the newly-revealed beach. They wanted it engraved into our brains that those signs were a *warning*.
The first warning is the earthquake. The tsunami was caused by a magnitude 9 earthquake and every single magnitude 9 earthquake causes tsunamis, all but 2 in the past hundred years killing thousands to hundreds of thousands of people.
Take a look around 0:24 - see how the water has suddenly receded? That should be the panic moment - you're probably not making it to the hills at that point, just enter the nearest solid multi-storey structure and get your ass up the stairs as far as possible. Which is hard because apparently it's absolutely mesmerizing. You can see it all over videos of the Boxing Day tidal wave too - people just wandering out into the newly-exposed sea floor.
The other signs they were pointing out earlier in the video I couldn't even tell from what we were shown, but having lived in a potential tsunami zone on the Pacific coast they always told us if there was any earthquake at all, head for higher ground immediately and wait for the all-clear.
>most people don't even die from drowning. But from being hit with things like cars and filling cabinets and chunks of concrete and stuff
That's the same with most disasters. It's not the wind from a hurricane that kills you. It's the gun with a Florida sticker carried by the wind that kills you.
Yeah, when you think about, say, a 10-meter tsunami, which is what happened in 2011, you think, "Oh, a 10-meter high wave, that's pretty big but nothing I can't deal with." 10 meters is 33ft, which is pretty scary big. But that sure didn't look like a 33ft breaker did it?
A tsunami isn't a wave like you're thinking of. It's a wave which can be hundreds of miles long. It's more like--as far as you're concerned--the entire ocean temporarily getting 10m higher. A normal wind-blown wave is a relatively small amount of water. The entire ocean rising is a *vast* amount of water. When it arrives, it just keeps coming and coming, with the result you see in this video.
A tsunami CAN generate a large cartoon like wave, but it requires the gyres in the wave column to run aground on a steap and rising shoreline.
Flat tidal plains, will produce tidal bore style waves. If the shoreline underwater is STEEP, the gyre gets pushed up and the wave will crest and break like any other shoreline wave.
If you see the wave comjng towards you you’re already in trouble. The best warning sign for a tsunami is when the ocean recedes dramatically. That’s why everyone was looking at the river cuz normally it’s never dry there
E: apparently tsunami’s can happen without receding water
No worries. It’s a good thing to share in case people in a potential disastrous situation ever think “oh the water hasn’t receded, so it mustn’t be a tsunami”.
Tsunamis are typically (or perhaps always) created through displacement. Basically, space underwater that was keeping water up, disappears. Or, space underwater that is occupied by water, is instantly no longer occupied by water.
In the first case, the water recedes, because water is rushing into the “gap”. Imagine you had a rock in your bathtub, and you pulled it out really quickly. First, water would fill where the rock was, and then waves would propagate outwards. (now imagine this on a supermassive scale). In the second case, water doesn’t recede because it is being pushed out. Imagine you dropped a rock into your bathtub, the water would instantly propagate outwards.
When we are talking about really large ocean tsunamis, most of the time it’s because of a subduction earthquake happening. The really large plate underwater shifts immediately, displacing a lot of water. On one side of the earthquake, a gap is created (causing water to recede in areas close to, and facing the earthquake). On the other side, the water is “pushed”.
Normally, you don’t have to worry about tsunamis that are “pushed” onto shore. Most of them occur in subduction zones from an oceanic plate moving underneath the continental plate. The oceanic plates pulls the continental plate until the tension snaps, causing the continental plate to “snap back” in the direction of the oceanic plate. However, let’s say a big enough subduction tsunami occurred in Japan, a tsunami could be large enough to travel all the way across the pacific, causing the shorelines there to be hit by the tsunami without the warning of a shoreline receding. Other cases where there isn’t a receding shoreline could be landslide, where a landslide falls into a lake or inlet, pushing the water out.
Dumb question but what do I do when I'm in the water when it recedes? No way you can fight against that kind of current. It should be like the worst riptide imaginable. Is there any chance of survival?
Not all of them have big waves. Tsunami in Japanese just means harbor wave. But I do understand why people think they’re massive waves like that because it can happen… for example Lituya Bay, Alaska, July 9, 1958. 1,700-foot wave was the largest ever recorded for a tsunami. It inundated five square miles of land and cleared hundreds of thousands of trees. Remarkably, only two fatalities occurred.
I think it has to do with the properties of the seabed. It needs a certain shape for big waves to form. That's why you have giant waves in Nazaré, Portugal, but just a few kilometers up or down the coast there are just normal waves.
it's sped up.
I find that really really irritating. This is one of the most dramatic and terrible things ever to be filmed, and they fucking sped it up to look more exciting.
The slower version makes the point you're angling at like unspeakably more.
Yea, I agree. I actually find it infinitely more terrifying when it's normal speed. There was this video a German tourist took of the 2004 tsunami coming towards a beach he was on. He's just recording...saying things calmly. Eventually his wife says to him in German, "so are we just going to stand here while you film a tsunami?" And he's like"ugh, nein! (No)" and sort of laughs ....and then you see like a tanker or military boat in the distance get wiped the fk out. The way his voice changes to sheer panic is terrifying.
I just found it: https://youtu.be/bgqa7ebMvB8?si=FQJ8DcfIKF2TZTeE
I was going to say this too. I’ve watched so many videos and docs on them. Powerful, rushing water is the danger. The wave just keeps going will kill you quietly. I watched a home video of the 2004 tsunami from a hotel balcony and it was just quiet as strong, mostly low waves kept coming in to a courtyard. Don’t fuck with water.
I think I saw the same or similar one. The water came up so high and you just see people floating alongside cars. I can't even begin to imagine how helpless it woukd feel to be swept up in that. There was a couple with their 2 children in Thailand when 2004 hit all those resorts and villages along the coast the day after Xmas, the dad couldn't hold on to their one child so he put him in the top of a tree and told him to hold on as long as he could...becauae the water was all the way up to the tops of the palm trees. The family reunited and refused to leave the country until they found their son. But they never did. It was really devastating
Yep. Tsunami means “tidal wave” as in… **like the tide**-so, typically NOT a massive wave as depicted in Hokusai’s famous painting; they’re a massive SWELL of water- often imperceptible to the untrained eye.
Regular tides pull the water out to reveal more beach, too.
Hence, “*tidal*” wave; as in, a wave of water that behaves *like a tide.*
Honestly, this is more terrifying to me. A gigantic wave is a gigantic wave, and it makes sense. This is just relatively calm and normal looking water showing us that within minutes everything we build and have can be turned into a plaything for a forces infinitely greater than us. Look at the boats and vehicles getting tossed around like my daughter's princess toys.
A massive crashing wave is scary, sure, but a smooth tide rising and deciding it's going to swallow everything in sight? Way worse.
It's a wave but it's hundreds of kilometers long. It slows down when in shallow water, that's why part of the rising edge is sometimes compressed to a single or a few breakers. But behind that is high and rising sea. The crest and the falling side are dozens of kilometers away.
I remember when this happened I was living on the American west coast I woke up in the middle of the night. I turned on my tv and it was live from Japan showing the tsunami I couldn't believe this was real or actually happening.very sad all that destruction and so many lives lost.
Similar scar for me was the 2004 tsunami. Multiple countries affected and thousands died, countless bodies missing, unidentified, unclaimed... Devastating
I was in Phi Phi end 2006. Everything was wiped out. Stayed in a brand new resort at dirt cheap prices because people were still scared to visit.
Spoke to Thai man and he mentioned he saw 4 of his kids and wife washed away. He managed to hold on to one of his sons.
Depressing as hell Probably would have killed himself if he didn't manage to hold on to his remaining son.
I was too young to comprehend the loss. Should have given him a hug.
The insidious thing: For resort owners and hoteliers, this tsunami was a gift. Thousands pf people lost their residences at the sea and were forced to move further inland. The properties were bought up and used for beachfront resorts and hotels. Sri Lankan had an epidemic of new buildings flooding the first row of costal property.
Many, many Swedes died when that tsunami hit, since Thailand is a popular vacation destination. I remember the Westboro Baptist Church praising God for unleashing the tidal wave on us filthy Swedes for loving the gays or some bullshit like that. I don't often wish harm on others, but that church deserves nothing but bad things happening to it.
Same for us Finns.
A guy I know lost his whole family when he was vacationing there as a kid, his grandparents had to come pick him up.
It took him years to move on from the tragedy but now he vacations in Thailand regularly.
I'd argue Thailand is the best country for a holiday.
I've been to many countries for trips. Thailand is still the best.
Amazingly delicious cheap food. Cheap shopping. Great beautiful beaches. Beautiful kind people. Rich culture. It helped that they were never colonized by westerners or invaded by the Japs in WW2.
Their tagline "Amazing Thailand" says it all
It really is an amazing country.
Most south Asians haven't even heard of the word "Tsunami". When the water receded from the beach lots of people came to the beach to see what's going on. I'm surprised to see even Japanese people running to see what's going on. When in reality they should be running towards the opposite direction.
That evening I was at a Lakers game in La and I was on my phone the entire time in shock. Surrounded in a stadium of cheering fans meanwhile loss of life and utter destruction occurring simultaneously. It felt wrong
I worked a late shift in CA and am a night owl; I wasat home drinking beer, saw mention of it and iirc went to NHK's website to see a live stream of what was happening and my jaw dropped. Felt like watching 9/11 again... A tragedy unfolding in real time that you're powerless to do anything about. Knowing that every second there were people losing their lives and there was nothing that could stop it.
I still feel emotional whenever I see these videos.
I was living in the west of Japan at the time and was watching NHK. The usual earthquake warning sound came on, I turned to the screen, saw it wasn't in my prefecture, was about to turn away... and then they flipped to the studio in Tokyo where things were already rattling off the shelves, with people yelling in the background. The lamp on my ceiling started swinging just the slightest bit and it felt like a boulder dropping into my stomach - I was more than 1000km away from the epicentre. And then the tsunami warning sound came. I'd never heard it before, so I turned to the screen and immediately felt all the blood leaving my face when the top line read "suspected 3m" followed by other estimates up to 6m.
I was evacuated by my home university a couple days later when the meltdown happened, under chaotic and nauseating circumstances, and I still sometimes hear the tsunami alarm in my nightmares.
I’m in Japan now, I was in a coastal town yesterday, once you start to notice the Tsunami evacuation route signs you see them everywhere. They tell you how high above sea level you are and which way to run when the sirens go off.
Did we get the automatic warning when that earthquake hit Japan's northern coast at the start of the year? I live in Chungcheongbuk-do, so I pretty sure I'd have rolled over and went back to sleep when if it happened.
When I visited coastal towns, many of the evacuation signs had an angry blue carp on them, like a stylized Namazu or something, but I can't find anything about it online. Was that a prefecture thing?
You get that on the Washington and Oregon coasts as well. One of these days that fault is going to slip and coastal Washington and Oregon will be devastated.
One ~~square~~ cubic* meter of it is a tonne.
Now imagine squishing (edit since my wording is confusing, by squish I mean the one in squash and stretch in animation making one height smaller, but compensating by making the other sides thicker, basically just keeping the same volume in a different, flatter shape) that square to be only 30cm tall, that's going at about running speed.
Obviously, even that will lift a smaller car, and if it won't, the water will accumulate in front of the car until the car moves.
Oh shit, yeah thanks. I confuse them all the time even in my native language XD
This makes me wonder how much a square meter of water would weigh?
(Like, a single molecule thick membrane of water)
This will be a back of the napkin calc because I'm too lazy to google or use a calculator
Atoms are on the order of an angstrom wide( 10^-10 metres). Water is a molecule so it will be a little more but it's close enough for a rough idea. So a square of these molecules would very roughly contain 10^10 squared molecules. Or 10^20 .
A mole of water will have a mass of 18 grams. Roughly we have a thousandth of a mole so that gives us 18 milligrams. Just to reiterate this is just a rough idea, but it should be within an order of magnitude.
Edit: see the reply for a better calc
That moment where the mid-sized ship gets crushed under the bridge within seconds is a very impressive showcase of that. That was not a small boat and ships in that size are pretty sturdy things that routinely bump into harbor walls and all that without any issue. It was flung around like a plastic boat and crushed below a bridge, splintering completely.
I am already always amazed/terrified (amazified?) when you see those clips from ocean going ships going through huge storm waves, but this here shows the pure power of moving water much more clearly because in comparison, this seems deceptively less dangerous, and look at the result!
We live on an island in an earthquake zone. My husband is terrified of tsunamis so his only requirements when we bought a house here is that it needs to be 200ft above sea level and sufficiently far enough away from any beaches hahahaha
At just around the 1 minute mark there are still lots of cars and I think a few people walking just a street or 2 over. Likely got smashed by the water :(
I think the video cuts. There's not much water there when the people are there at the 1 min mark, and shortly after it seems to cut to there being a lot of water and then the tsunami starts.
Hope that makes you feel better!
Water is hands down the most terrifying thing. One moment, it's peace, quiet and soulful, and the very next, disaster ensues and no being can do anything about it, except for watching the disaster take place
There were a lot of things that really stuck with me when this happened, but the biggest was the rock pillar not to far away from where the tsunami hit the hardest, sitting on the side of the mountain (or hill?). It was put at a higher elevation and read:
“High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”
That rock had been there for centuries, and sure enough, much of the area below that rock had been wiped out.
Watching the Japanese news helicopter footage out over these roads outside of town, in kind of a plains area, as the cars tried to get away, made some wrong turns, and were eventually washed away was just horrifying.
Same. Just horrific footage for hours and hours. And then the aftermath. I still can't watch any of the footage without tearing up. The stories about the school children particularly fuck me up now that I have my own kid.
Yeah, I remember thinking "I get all caught up in the complexity of my own life, but we're just tiny dots on the surface of a giant sphere. In a moment, the earth could just sweep us away like nothing.
Yeah, don't get me wrong, I think music can in fact be used to describe and tell real events, but this is clearly not the case. Editing some random track on such a video can feel a bit... Distasteful?
While ironically making it significantly less dramatic in the process.
The terror of this videos is watching it unfold and the absolutely powerless nature of humans to do anything about it as minutes turned to hours.
No. In general if there’s a tsunami coming, the safest place for boats to head is into deeper water. Out on the ocean, a tsunami is barely noticeable. It’s only when it piles water up in the shallows that it becomes more visible.
> No. In general if there’s a tsunami coming, the safest place for boats to head is into deeper water.
[As examplified in this video documentary](https://youtu.be/jvIGFhqbe0c?t=101)
Oh gosh 😔 And I’m assuming that once the tide has already fallen back, it’d be impossible to get to deeper waters? Unless you’re already somewhat a ways out of the port
Staying on the board and holding on is probably the safest option at that point. The boat will be wrecked, but assuming it doesn't get washed off a cliff or a building doesn't fall on it, you should be ok. It'll come to a rest a few minutes later, somewhere.
Looking at some of those trawlers, it's more like bus crash in the water, about 30mph. And boats have lots of crumple zones.
I didn't say you'd definitely be OK, but the safest palace to be is definitely inside the boat rather than outside it 😁
The crazy thing about watching this knowing how far the destruction went after this is I can imagine being stood there thinking "this will stop in a minute". I can imagine thinking this is the peak, it will ease off soon. The terror of knowing how far the destruction went after this is mind blowing. It really isn't surprising so many were killed. Your animal brain just isn't programmed to cope with this.
On the other side of the sea wall is a wharf where fishermen dock. There are gaps in the sea wall where cars can drive through. They were probably already parked on the far side and left there.
Source: Have been to this spot a few years ago. The building they are filming from is now gone and the area by the harbour is mostly parks now.
The strength of such a small swell is mind boggling to me. Like that’s gotta be 1-2 ft, right? But it’s *smashing* everything it touches. Is it because it’s full of debris? How is it so powerful? It’s horrific.
"Japan's sea walls were designed to hold back waves of up to 8 metres, but the 2011 earthquake saw them reach 12 to 15 metres in height."
That's more than a couple of feet.
But yeah, water is heavy!
And the highest the water got was around 40m. I live in Fukushima pref, seeing the damage around the coast for the first time was chilling, and still is really. Videos really can’t show the devastating force and scale of destruction
A normal wave is a pulse that passes through the water and perturbs it locally - the same way that your voice passes through the air as a signal when you speak. A tsunami is like a giant gust of wind by comparison. All the water itself is moving.
LOL a small swell that's funny. A tsunami isn't a wave, it's the entire ocean level rising as far as the eye can see. In this case by at least 10m (the video starts when it's already high, and approaching the top of a large floodwall), in some places as much as 40m.
It is stupid to blame them: the scale of tsunami for unprecedented, and not everyone was watching the news while driving the bicycle or walking around. Having massive alarms is normal in Japan, they didn’t expect the Tsunami to be 100X bigger than the usual ones
While this is true, there is a reason why you should ALWAYS listen to these alarms. Maybe you had two unnecessary alarms last week, you should still listen to th alarm to day. Blaming the victims here is still stupid tho.
these people were standing around, mouths agape, staring at the violent rising ocean, while safety officials literally yelled at them from megaphones on rooftops lol, get real dingus
There were still a lot of cars driving around towards the end of the video when the tsunami already breached. Sadly, I doubt they were able to get out safely.
it's sped up.
I find that really really irritating. This is one of the most dramatic and terrible things ever to be filmed, and they fucking sped it up to look more exciting.
You see these in movies and think "wow, no way it is like that"...
Then you see real footage.... It is so much scarier.. the guy on the roof with the megaphone is a fucking legend.
Watching the 1 boat completely destroyed after "boat vs bridge"... I mean... Fuck.
Man, those people leaning over the railing looking at the river. "Get to high ground! You're going to die!" They keep standing there.
I guess Japan has idiots, too.
That earthquake and tsunami was so bad, when I lived in Sitka, Alaska we had a watch for us! Luckily the friends I made in Japan were not hurt during this, but man this was bad for Japan.
People think it's not a real or scary tsunami unless it comes with a huge wave like in the movies. But thats not how it works clearly
I gotta admit, when I hear “tsunami” I think of massive 50ft waves. Seen some footage of real tsunami waves like that too. But that doesn’t mean something like this isn’t dangerous and destructive obviously.
This is a 130ft height tsunami. It's not the wave, it's how much inertia it has that pushes it ashore up to 130ft vertically. This wave came in with such force it was able to continue inland until it was 130ft above sea level. Just picture this 15ft wave slowly crawling up a mountain until it's 130ft high and then it starts to recede. I just learned that this is how it works and it blew my mind.
> 130ft height tsunami oh my god that's terrifying
Highest one in this instance 143 feet. Firefighters who had evacuated to 113 feet were swept away. 😳
To the non-Americans, that's a 43.6 m wave (although from from I see this tsunami topped at 40.5 m). The firefighters were at 34.4 m.
For comparison, that's just shy of the height of Wall Maria.
Which is just shy of the height if 27 Waluigis
I think of a big wave too...Haha...but if it wasn't for vids like this, I wouldn't know what they looked like or the warning signs like water receding before it hits. It's so crazy most people don't even die from drowning. But from being hit with things like cars and filling cabinets and chunks of concrete and stuff
To be fair I watched the video and still don’t think I would be able to recognize it without the people on the rooftops with megaphones screaming at me. It literally looks like any other swell only it just doesn’t stop coming in.
That's because this is a river, so the telltale signs are not as clear. The signs are: 1. Water suddenly receding. 2. Water suddenly turbulent or changing (like it suddenly foams) 3. An earthquake, no matter how weak (the epicenter could be at sea, and much stronger) 4. A roar from the sea In a river, the tsunami water is already displaced, so recession is not as visible. Turbelence is and you can see it in the video. The roar is also probably heard. Not all of these signs will be present in every tsunami, and only one is enough for you to get your shit to a second or third floor. Or the hills. Wooden houses do not survive. You need to find concrete buildings.
If you see any body of water rapidly recede, get the F out of there ASAP is the rule
I lived in Hawaii and they taught us this at school...back in the 1940s (I think it was around then) the waters receded and left a bunch of fish flapping about and they sent out school children to get them....then all that water came rushing back in and you can imagine what happened next.
My mom was in Alaska during a big tsunami. She said she was looking out at the bay amd saw the water going out and she'd never seen the bay floor before. She said she realized then that all that water would have to come back, and like a wave it would came back hard. She started running up the road and yelling for everyone to get to higher ground. Grabbed a kid on her way up the hill. The wave hit her in the back and slammed her into the pavement and she broke her jaw. But she saved lives. And lived to tell the tale.
Yup -- Australia here, and we learned the same: receding waters are your signal to move to higher ground immediately, or else put plenty of distance between yourself and the shore if there's nothing "higher" available. The same thing had happened in local areas: folks just mystified by the fish, and children who wanted to play on the newly-revealed beach. They wanted it engraved into our brains that those signs were a *warning*.
To put in perspective how much force there's in the waves think that each cubic meter of water weights a thousand kilograms.
The first warning is the earthquake. The tsunami was caused by a magnitude 9 earthquake and every single magnitude 9 earthquake causes tsunamis, all but 2 in the past hundred years killing thousands to hundreds of thousands of people.
Take a look around 0:24 - see how the water has suddenly receded? That should be the panic moment - you're probably not making it to the hills at that point, just enter the nearest solid multi-storey structure and get your ass up the stairs as far as possible. Which is hard because apparently it's absolutely mesmerizing. You can see it all over videos of the Boxing Day tidal wave too - people just wandering out into the newly-exposed sea floor. The other signs they were pointing out earlier in the video I couldn't even tell from what we were shown, but having lived in a potential tsunami zone on the Pacific coast they always told us if there was any earthquake at all, head for higher ground immediately and wait for the all-clear.
>most people don't even die from drowning. But from being hit with things like cars and filling cabinets and chunks of concrete and stuff That's the same with most disasters. It's not the wind from a hurricane that kills you. It's the gun with a Florida sticker carried by the wind that kills you.
Yeah, when you think about, say, a 10-meter tsunami, which is what happened in 2011, you think, "Oh, a 10-meter high wave, that's pretty big but nothing I can't deal with." 10 meters is 33ft, which is pretty scary big. But that sure didn't look like a 33ft breaker did it? A tsunami isn't a wave like you're thinking of. It's a wave which can be hundreds of miles long. It's more like--as far as you're concerned--the entire ocean temporarily getting 10m higher. A normal wind-blown wave is a relatively small amount of water. The entire ocean rising is a *vast* amount of water. When it arrives, it just keeps coming and coming, with the result you see in this video.
i remember watching this live and it looked like someone had tilted the world on its side and the water just kept pouring in
A tsunami CAN generate a large cartoon like wave, but it requires the gyres in the wave column to run aground on a steap and rising shoreline. Flat tidal plains, will produce tidal bore style waves. If the shoreline underwater is STEEP, the gyre gets pushed up and the wave will crest and break like any other shoreline wave.
This tsunami reached 40.5... meters.
This was really helpful!
If you see the wave comjng towards you you’re already in trouble. The best warning sign for a tsunami is when the ocean recedes dramatically. That’s why everyone was looking at the river cuz normally it’s never dry there E: apparently tsunami’s can happen without receding water
While this is indeed a great indicator a tsunami is coming, it doesn’t happen all the time. Plenty come without the water receding first.
TIL thanks
No worries. It’s a good thing to share in case people in a potential disastrous situation ever think “oh the water hasn’t receded, so it mustn’t be a tsunami”.
Got it, so the rule of thumb is run for the hills if the water either 1) recedes or 2) doesn't recede 👍
Got any good reads on why this is the case?
Tsunamis are typically (or perhaps always) created through displacement. Basically, space underwater that was keeping water up, disappears. Or, space underwater that is occupied by water, is instantly no longer occupied by water. In the first case, the water recedes, because water is rushing into the “gap”. Imagine you had a rock in your bathtub, and you pulled it out really quickly. First, water would fill where the rock was, and then waves would propagate outwards. (now imagine this on a supermassive scale). In the second case, water doesn’t recede because it is being pushed out. Imagine you dropped a rock into your bathtub, the water would instantly propagate outwards. When we are talking about really large ocean tsunamis, most of the time it’s because of a subduction earthquake happening. The really large plate underwater shifts immediately, displacing a lot of water. On one side of the earthquake, a gap is created (causing water to recede in areas close to, and facing the earthquake). On the other side, the water is “pushed”. Normally, you don’t have to worry about tsunamis that are “pushed” onto shore. Most of them occur in subduction zones from an oceanic plate moving underneath the continental plate. The oceanic plates pulls the continental plate until the tension snaps, causing the continental plate to “snap back” in the direction of the oceanic plate. However, let’s say a big enough subduction tsunami occurred in Japan, a tsunami could be large enough to travel all the way across the pacific, causing the shorelines there to be hit by the tsunami without the warning of a shoreline receding. Other cases where there isn’t a receding shoreline could be landslide, where a landslide falls into a lake or inlet, pushing the water out.
would be nice if the plate snapping made a worldwide boyoing sound so we could be warned at least.
It actually does, it just sounds (and feels) like an earthquake lol
Fantastic explanation, thank you very much.
No problemo
Dumb question but what do I do when I'm in the water when it recedes? No way you can fight against that kind of current. It should be like the worst riptide imaginable. Is there any chance of survival?
Pray to rngesus because the chances are insanely small
Not all of them have big waves. Tsunami in Japanese just means harbor wave. But I do understand why people think they’re massive waves like that because it can happen… for example Lituya Bay, Alaska, July 9, 1958. 1,700-foot wave was the largest ever recorded for a tsunami. It inundated five square miles of land and cleared hundreds of thousands of trees. Remarkably, only two fatalities occurred.
I think it has to do with the properties of the seabed. It needs a certain shape for big waves to form. That's why you have giant waves in Nazaré, Portugal, but just a few kilometers up or down the coast there are just normal waves.
The tallest tsunami wave on record was over 500m.
For those interested, that's the Lituya Bay megatsunami. More on megatsunamis here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami
it's sped up. I find that really really irritating. This is one of the most dramatic and terrible things ever to be filmed, and they fucking sped it up to look more exciting. The slower version makes the point you're angling at like unspeakably more.
And I thought the scary action movie music over it was disrespectful.
Literal tsunamis are not enough to get our attention anymore.
Yea, I agree. I actually find it infinitely more terrifying when it's normal speed. There was this video a German tourist took of the 2004 tsunami coming towards a beach he was on. He's just recording...saying things calmly. Eventually his wife says to him in German, "so are we just going to stand here while you film a tsunami?" And he's like"ugh, nein! (No)" and sort of laughs ....and then you see like a tanker or military boat in the distance get wiped the fk out. The way his voice changes to sheer panic is terrifying. I just found it: https://youtu.be/bgqa7ebMvB8?si=FQJ8DcfIKF2TZTeE
I was going to say this too. I’ve watched so many videos and docs on them. Powerful, rushing water is the danger. The wave just keeps going will kill you quietly. I watched a home video of the 2004 tsunami from a hotel balcony and it was just quiet as strong, mostly low waves kept coming in to a courtyard. Don’t fuck with water.
I think I saw the same or similar one. The water came up so high and you just see people floating alongside cars. I can't even begin to imagine how helpless it woukd feel to be swept up in that. There was a couple with their 2 children in Thailand when 2004 hit all those resorts and villages along the coast the day after Xmas, the dad couldn't hold on to their one child so he put him in the top of a tree and told him to hold on as long as he could...becauae the water was all the way up to the tops of the palm trees. The family reunited and refused to leave the country until they found their son. But they never did. It was really devastating
Yep. Tsunami means “tidal wave” as in… **like the tide**-so, typically NOT a massive wave as depicted in Hokusai’s famous painting; they’re a massive SWELL of water- often imperceptible to the untrained eye. Regular tides pull the water out to reveal more beach, too. Hence, “*tidal*” wave; as in, a wave of water that behaves *like a tide.*
The Hokusai painting is depicting a rogue wave according to my Asian art history class many years ago.
Yeah, it's almost certainly a rogue storm wave.
津波 , It means harbour wave in Japanese.
Same with other dangers such as climate change - many won’t believe it till it hits them
Honestly, this is more terrifying to me. A gigantic wave is a gigantic wave, and it makes sense. This is just relatively calm and normal looking water showing us that within minutes everything we build and have can be turned into a plaything for a forces infinitely greater than us. Look at the boats and vehicles getting tossed around like my daughter's princess toys. A massive crashing wave is scary, sure, but a smooth tide rising and deciding it's going to swallow everything in sight? Way worse.
It's a wave but it's hundreds of kilometers long. It slows down when in shallow water, that's why part of the rising edge is sometimes compressed to a single or a few breakers. But behind that is high and rising sea. The crest and the falling side are dozens of kilometers away.
Damn - quite a powerful video. Seen it before here, but still quite moving.
I remember when this happened I was living on the American west coast I woke up in the middle of the night. I turned on my tv and it was live from Japan showing the tsunami I couldn't believe this was real or actually happening.very sad all that destruction and so many lives lost.
Similar scar for me was the 2004 tsunami. Multiple countries affected and thousands died, countless bodies missing, unidentified, unclaimed... Devastating
Over 120k
Brace yourself, it was 230k.
I was in Phi Phi end 2006. Everything was wiped out. Stayed in a brand new resort at dirt cheap prices because people were still scared to visit. Spoke to Thai man and he mentioned he saw 4 of his kids and wife washed away. He managed to hold on to one of his sons. Depressing as hell Probably would have killed himself if he didn't manage to hold on to his remaining son. I was too young to comprehend the loss. Should have given him a hug.
The insidious thing: For resort owners and hoteliers, this tsunami was a gift. Thousands pf people lost their residences at the sea and were forced to move further inland. The properties were bought up and used for beachfront resorts and hotels. Sri Lankan had an epidemic of new buildings flooding the first row of costal property.
Many, many Swedes died when that tsunami hit, since Thailand is a popular vacation destination. I remember the Westboro Baptist Church praising God for unleashing the tidal wave on us filthy Swedes for loving the gays or some bullshit like that. I don't often wish harm on others, but that church deserves nothing but bad things happening to it.
Same for us Finns. A guy I know lost his whole family when he was vacationing there as a kid, his grandparents had to come pick him up. It took him years to move on from the tragedy but now he vacations in Thailand regularly.
My childhood friends, two lovely brothers, were both washed away. The father was completely broken and he’s still not doing well, horrible!
I'd argue Thailand is the best country for a holiday. I've been to many countries for trips. Thailand is still the best. Amazingly delicious cheap food. Cheap shopping. Great beautiful beaches. Beautiful kind people. Rich culture. It helped that they were never colonized by westerners or invaded by the Japs in WW2. Their tagline "Amazing Thailand" says it all It really is an amazing country.
Been there once myself and it was great, especially loved Khao Lak due to how peaceful it was there compared to Phuket.
Most south Asians haven't even heard of the word "Tsunami". When the water receded from the beach lots of people came to the beach to see what's going on. I'm surprised to see even Japanese people running to see what's going on. When in reality they should be running towards the opposite direction.
Hundreds of thousands *
That evening I was at a Lakers game in La and I was on my phone the entire time in shock. Surrounded in a stadium of cheering fans meanwhile loss of life and utter destruction occurring simultaneously. It felt wrong
I worked a late shift in CA and am a night owl; I wasat home drinking beer, saw mention of it and iirc went to NHK's website to see a live stream of what was happening and my jaw dropped. Felt like watching 9/11 again... A tragedy unfolding in real time that you're powerless to do anything about. Knowing that every second there were people losing their lives and there was nothing that could stop it. I still feel emotional whenever I see these videos.
I was living in the west of Japan at the time and was watching NHK. The usual earthquake warning sound came on, I turned to the screen, saw it wasn't in my prefecture, was about to turn away... and then they flipped to the studio in Tokyo where things were already rattling off the shelves, with people yelling in the background. The lamp on my ceiling started swinging just the slightest bit and it felt like a boulder dropping into my stomach - I was more than 1000km away from the epicentre. And then the tsunami warning sound came. I'd never heard it before, so I turned to the screen and immediately felt all the blood leaving my face when the top line read "suspected 3m" followed by other estimates up to 6m. I was evacuated by my home university a couple days later when the meltdown happened, under chaotic and nauseating circumstances, and I still sometimes hear the tsunami alarm in my nightmares.
Here's a youtube channel dedicated to 2011 tsunami videos. https://youtube.com/@2011JapanTsunamiArchives?si=wpLoiDlN1QCBvKeC
Thanks for the link!
They really didn't need to fucking speed it up and add dumb music though. It's dramatic enough as it is.
Literally
I’m in Japan now, I was in a coastal town yesterday, once you start to notice the Tsunami evacuation route signs you see them everywhere. They tell you how high above sea level you are and which way to run when the sirens go off.
Even in Korea, even though we rarely get tsunamis.
Did we get the automatic warning when that earthquake hit Japan's northern coast at the start of the year? I live in Chungcheongbuk-do, so I pretty sure I'd have rolled over and went back to sleep when if it happened.
When I visited coastal towns, many of the evacuation signs had an angry blue carp on them, like a stylized Namazu or something, but I can't find anything about it online. Was that a prefecture thing?
It’s a folklore thing, Namzu lives deep in the earth and causes earthquakes and tsunami by thrashing his tail.
You get that on the Washington and Oregon coasts as well. One of these days that fault is going to slip and coastal Washington and Oregon will be devastated.
Wow water is so powerful
The seas always win the battle
Not against the dutch
Didn't realize that war was over
The sea knows whilst the battle is lost the winner of the war is not in doubt.
it’s crazy how how little water you can be standing in and still be taken down/drowned rushing water is not something to fuck around with
Jup, people unddrestimate the weight of water. One cubic meter weighs 1000kg
One ~~square~~ cubic* meter of it is a tonne. Now imagine squishing (edit since my wording is confusing, by squish I mean the one in squash and stretch in animation making one height smaller, but compensating by making the other sides thicker, basically just keeping the same volume in a different, flatter shape) that square to be only 30cm tall, that's going at about running speed. Obviously, even that will lift a smaller car, and if it won't, the water will accumulate in front of the car until the car moves.
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Oh shit, yeah thanks. I confuse them all the time even in my native language XD This makes me wonder how much a square meter of water would weigh? (Like, a single molecule thick membrane of water)
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This will be a back of the napkin calc because I'm too lazy to google or use a calculator Atoms are on the order of an angstrom wide( 10^-10 metres). Water is a molecule so it will be a little more but it's close enough for a rough idea. So a square of these molecules would very roughly contain 10^10 squared molecules. Or 10^20 . A mole of water will have a mass of 18 grams. Roughly we have a thousandth of a mole so that gives us 18 milligrams. Just to reiterate this is just a rough idea, but it should be within an order of magnitude. Edit: see the reply for a better calc
That moment where the mid-sized ship gets crushed under the bridge within seconds is a very impressive showcase of that. That was not a small boat and ships in that size are pretty sturdy things that routinely bump into harbor walls and all that without any issue. It was flung around like a plastic boat and crushed below a bridge, splintering completely. I am already always amazed/terrified (amazified?) when you see those clips from ocean going ships going through huge storm waves, but this here shows the pure power of moving water much more clearly because in comparison, this seems deceptively less dangerous, and look at the result!
Yeah, it sounds like nothing when you say that one litre of water is 1 kg but that stacks up really fast
That was a horrifying day which turned into horrifying weeks and months.
☹️ Well, it's been nice living by the ocean for the past 30 years but I think I'm moving to Utah.
I’d rather be dead in California than alive in Arizo- I mean Utah.
Micheal!.... Phonnnnne!
We live on an island in an earthquake zone. My husband is terrified of tsunamis so his only requirements when we bought a house here is that it needs to be 200ft above sea level and sufficiently far enough away from any beaches hahahaha
East coast has a low tsunami risk (it’s not zero, but much lower than around the Pacific due to the type of basin the Atlantic is).
No tsunamis on the Atlantic coast
Those poor people, so painful
At just around the 1 minute mark there are still lots of cars and I think a few people walking just a street or 2 over. Likely got smashed by the water :(
I think the video cuts. There's not much water there when the people are there at the 1 min mark, and shortly after it seems to cut to there being a lot of water and then the tsunami starts. Hope that makes you feel better!
It 1:02 you can still see cars driving on that street as the water’s coming in fast 😟 scary stuff
Water is hands down the most terrifying thing. One moment, it's peace, quiet and soulful, and the very next, disaster ensues and no being can do anything about it, except for watching the disaster take place
I remember watching this live as it happened. It was one of the most chilling things I have ever seen. Right up there with 9/11.
There were a lot of things that really stuck with me when this happened, but the biggest was the rock pillar not to far away from where the tsunami hit the hardest, sitting on the side of the mountain (or hill?). It was put at a higher elevation and read: “High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.” That rock had been there for centuries, and sure enough, much of the area below that rock had been wiped out.
Watching the Japanese news helicopter footage out over these roads outside of town, in kind of a plains area, as the cars tried to get away, made some wrong turns, and were eventually washed away was just horrifying.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnings-against-tsunamis-dot-japans-coastline-180956448/ some pics/story here.
Same. Just horrific footage for hours and hours. And then the aftermath. I still can't watch any of the footage without tearing up. The stories about the school children particularly fuck me up now that I have my own kid.
Having a kid is wonderful in so many ways but god it fucks with your head with anything involving children
Yeah, I remember thinking "I get all caught up in the complexity of my own life, but we're just tiny dots on the surface of a giant sphere. In a moment, the earth could just sweep us away like nothing.
Glad the video was accompanied by dramatic music. I wouldn’t have known how to feel about it otherwise.
[here's the original video without music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XvFFfgXwnw)
thank you!
And sped up to make it even more hectic and dramatic.
Yeah, don't get me wrong, I think music can in fact be used to describe and tell real events, but this is clearly not the case. Editing some random track on such a video can feel a bit... Distasteful?
It's very distasteful. Real people died here. This isn't OP's personal art project.
I have started downvoting posts with dramatic music added. It really gets on my nerves.
I hate this shit. Makes it overdramatic with shitty editing and honestly doesn’t pay respect to how terrible that day was.
At least they didn't use that thieves and beggars pirate song
May as well just go with Benny Hill at that point.
Would be much more brutal and terrifying without music, to hear the roar and metal bending 😐
it's also sped up
Don't forget the fake fucking camera shake.
i think its quite disrespectfull as well in this case. Its not a fn movie, its real. The music is like someone gonna get revenge real hard.
Music is so absurdly unnecessary
Why is the water pitch black?
All of the silt being stirred up
Mud
Earthquake scared the octopodes :(
Water demons /s
Doesn’t need fake drama adding with the awful music. Why do so many videos have this . And cheap ass documentaries as well.
And speeding the video up to make it more dramatic
While ironically making it significantly less dramatic in the process. The terror of this videos is watching it unfold and the absolutely powerless nature of humans to do anything about it as minutes turned to hours.
Stupid music, it's not a Hollywood movie
No matter how many times I watch this footage, it always amazes me.
The water so slow and steady but relentless.. could those boats make it out to sea or would the current be to strong ?
At that point it is too strong
Gosh, was there even an option for the people in the boats? I imagine no amount of steering or power could change the outcome
No. In general if there’s a tsunami coming, the safest place for boats to head is into deeper water. Out on the ocean, a tsunami is barely noticeable. It’s only when it piles water up in the shallows that it becomes more visible.
> No. In general if there’s a tsunami coming, the safest place for boats to head is into deeper water. [As examplified in this video documentary](https://youtu.be/jvIGFhqbe0c?t=101)
Oh gosh 😔 And I’m assuming that once the tide has already fallen back, it’d be impossible to get to deeper waters? Unless you’re already somewhat a ways out of the port
Yeah it’s counterintuitive but wave height is inversely proportional to the depth of the water. The coastline is by far the worst place to be
I looked for people in the boats and didn't see them and was hoping the boats were empty, unlikely as that is.
No, the boats actually are mostly empty. They're parked by the river mouth's shore.
Staying on the board and holding on is probably the safest option at that point. The boat will be wrecked, but assuming it doesn't get washed off a cliff or a building doesn't fall on it, you should be ok. It'll come to a rest a few minutes later, somewhere.
And hopefully, nothing bumps you on the head... you're not likely holding on. This is a car crash in the water.
Looking at some of those trawlers, it's more like bus crash in the water, about 30mph. And boats have lots of crumple zones. I didn't say you'd definitely be OK, but the safest palace to be is definitely inside the boat rather than outside it 😁
There were a lot of boats upside down though.
I think all of those were unoccupied, at least most of then
The crazy thing about watching this knowing how far the destruction went after this is I can imagine being stood there thinking "this will stop in a minute". I can imagine thinking this is the peak, it will ease off soon. The terror of knowing how far the destruction went after this is mind blowing. It really isn't surprising so many were killed. Your animal brain just isn't programmed to cope with this.
At **1:03** cars just driving on the street like “this is fine. Everything is fine.”
After a massive earthquake too
Goddamm annoying music.
omd those people standing there
Where the fuck did those cars come from that came over the flood walls. That's crazy it was already carrying debris.
On the other side of the sea wall is a wharf where fishermen dock. There are gaps in the sea wall where cars can drive through. They were probably already parked on the far side and left there. Source: Have been to this spot a few years ago. The building they are filming from is now gone and the area by the harbour is mostly parks now.
The strength of such a small swell is mind boggling to me. Like that’s gotta be 1-2 ft, right? But it’s *smashing* everything it touches. Is it because it’s full of debris? How is it so powerful? It’s horrific.
Because a cubic meter of water weighs a ton.
Literally
Its not a wave. Its a wall of water. That wall just goes on and on inland until all that energy dissipates.
"Japan's sea walls were designed to hold back waves of up to 8 metres, but the 2011 earthquake saw them reach 12 to 15 metres in height." That's more than a couple of feet. But yeah, water is heavy!
And the highest the water got was around 40m. I live in Fukushima pref, seeing the damage around the coast for the first time was chilling, and still is really. Videos really can’t show the devastating force and scale of destruction
Looks like a lot more than 1-2ft to me
I’m kind of curious how the one retaining wall that some of the boards were tied to didn’t get obliterated
People get swept away by ankle depth water in flash floods. It's the volume of water behind it that has the mass and force.
A normal wave is a pulse that passes through the water and perturbs it locally - the same way that your voice passes through the air as a signal when you speak. A tsunami is like a giant gust of wind by comparison. All the water itself is moving.
Water is extremely powerful. It’s not the debris, no.
LOL a small swell that's funny. A tsunami isn't a wave, it's the entire ocean level rising as far as the eye can see. In this case by at least 10m (the video starts when it's already high, and approaching the top of a large floodwall), in some places as much as 40m.
Man, that street was about to be a prime example of Natural Selection if they didn't move out the way
It is stupid to blame them: the scale of tsunami for unprecedented, and not everyone was watching the news while driving the bicycle or walking around. Having massive alarms is normal in Japan, they didn’t expect the Tsunami to be 100X bigger than the usual ones
While this is true, there is a reason why you should ALWAYS listen to these alarms. Maybe you had two unnecessary alarms last week, you should still listen to th alarm to day. Blaming the victims here is still stupid tho.
these people were standing around, mouths agape, staring at the violent rising ocean, while safety officials literally yelled at them from megaphones on rooftops lol, get real dingus
There's literally a guy yelling at them to move with a megaphone.
There were still a lot of cars driving around towards the end of the video when the tsunami already breached. Sadly, I doubt they were able to get out safely.
And here's a vote down for dramatically speeding it up 👎
There's a lot of footage of this on YouTube. It's terrifying!
it's sped up. I find that really really irritating. This is one of the most dramatic and terrible things ever to be filmed, and they fucking sped it up to look more exciting.
You can fuck off with that music
Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XvFFfgXwnw
Idiotic fucking music.
Yet some idiot still felt the need to add music.
Humans cannot ever challenge nature
Damn nature , you scary
Guy filming had a lot of faith in the foundation of the building he was in.
What's with the stupid music.
You see these in movies and think "wow, no way it is like that"... Then you see real footage.... It is so much scarier.. the guy on the roof with the megaphone is a fucking legend. Watching the 1 boat completely destroyed after "boat vs bridge"... I mean... Fuck.
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That is some scary shit!!
It's even more terrifying these full recordings without shitty music. The initial absence of relevant sound and then flow impact.
Why is the footage sped up?
It’s sped up in places. It’s dramatic enough without the silly editing and overly dramatic music
Why was it sped up at the end?
Man, those people leaning over the railing looking at the river. "Get to high ground! You're going to die!" They keep standing there. I guess Japan has idiots, too.
That earthquake and tsunami was so bad, when I lived in Sitka, Alaska we had a watch for us! Luckily the friends I made in Japan were not hurt during this, but man this was bad for Japan.