Otter
Nothing to see here
From the WaPo, ought to be interesting to those that like these types of documentaries. PBS - 9PM tonight.
....The water above the rupture doesn't just shoot straight up in a geyser, however. It rockets outward at speeds up to 600 miles an hour, as fast as a passenger jet. In deep water, the surface of the ocean does little more than ripple.
But as the wave roils into shallow water, it slows down and grows exponentially higher.
"It slows down to 400, 300, 200 miles an hour," British oceanographer Simon Boxall says on the show. "The back of the wave is still going at 500 miles an hour and the back of the wave catches up with the first, and then you get this big buildup of water."
Tens of thousands of people in the coastal lands of Sumatra, the nearest landfall, had no chance. The waves likely hit within 15 minutes of the quake and were so massive -- they were estimated to hit land with the force of 100,000 tons of water for every five feet of beachfront -- no warnings would have helped. The rush of water could have been 30 feet or higher.
....The water above the rupture doesn't just shoot straight up in a geyser, however. It rockets outward at speeds up to 600 miles an hour, as fast as a passenger jet. In deep water, the surface of the ocean does little more than ripple.
But as the wave roils into shallow water, it slows down and grows exponentially higher.
"It slows down to 400, 300, 200 miles an hour," British oceanographer Simon Boxall says on the show. "The back of the wave is still going at 500 miles an hour and the back of the wave catches up with the first, and then you get this big buildup of water."
Tens of thousands of people in the coastal lands of Sumatra, the nearest landfall, had no chance. The waves likely hit within 15 minutes of the quake and were so massive -- they were estimated to hit land with the force of 100,000 tons of water for every five feet of beachfront -- no warnings would have helped. The rush of water could have been 30 feet or higher.
