How Tsunamis Work

And we can't wait to see you, guys, So please come out and see us. And if you want tickets, you can go to s y s K live dot com for those. And Chuck and yes to our friends down and Melbourne. Boy, we are super psyched because you love us and you sold us out very quickly. So we have added a second show that I believe is actually an earlier show, isn't that right? Yeah, it's a five thirties show. I believe that Melbourne is the one that we added, and it's gonna be cool. It's gonna

be like a sweet little Mattinee. Yeah, we call that happy Hour in our kind tree. Yeah that's right. So make sure you guys bring a slab each. That's right in Perth and Brisbane. Step it up. Yeah, that's right. So if you want to come see us, go to s Y s K Live. Whether you're in the US, whether you're in Australia, whether you're in New Zealand, it doesn't matter. You can go to the same site and hang out with us and there you go. See you guys soon. Welcome to Stuff you should know from how

Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. Tristan's reign of terror is over. Jerry had him killed. Yeah, he shouldn't have tried to take her place. I mean, he got what he deserved. Now there's just a grease spot on the carpet. Yeah, it was gross. You didn't have to leave him there for a week, Jerry. I thought that was a little weird. Also to bring in a acid bath into this, you right, well,

it made sense when she dissolved him in acid. Can I say something Yes, the two that we're recording today, Yeah, I feel like are such kind of classic core stuff. You should know e things. I know what you're gonna say that. I'm surprised we haven't done them yet. I searched probably three times, maybe five Chuck, Yes, they doesn't like we've gone over this stuff before. It. I can't, for the life of me figure out what it is.

The closest I could come possibly was rogue waves, yeah, for sure, or how yeah, or how nuclear meltdowns work when we when we talked specifically about the Fukushima incident. Yeah, I think that had to be what it is. Because I'm still a little paranoid that we've covered this before. Yeah, I am too, So we're paranoid together. Yeah, but we'll we'll fail together there if we re record an episode that we have done before. But it's okay, we'll be

all right right, everybody right, all right? So both of our listeners, uh, Chuck and Buck. Wow, I know, isn't that random that one of our two listeners is also named Chuck? Did you see that movie? No? You know that was a movie, right, Yeah, there was a movie called Chuck and Buck. Was it a porno? Not exactly? Well? What was what was it about? It was? You know,

Mike White, right, No, you'd recognize him. He's an actor and a writer, one of my favorite writers in Hollywood, and he it was his first little indie film, starring him and one of the brothers, one of the filmmaking brothers, the Wise Brothers. Man. You were not talking my language right now. Yeah, anyway, it was. It was him and he played sort of a creepy guy that had unhealthy crush on this other guy, and it got made for

some very uncomfortable circumstances. You're talking about, I now pronounce you chucking, Larry. I know the movie you're talking about. I never saw that one either. Oh hey, speaking of dude, I saw Norm McDonald stand up Dog. Is it great? Yes? Probably probably the best stand up on Netflix right now. I've been meaning to watch it and he's just a it's it's he's at his peak. It's great. I don't want to talk it up too much. Just go in

there fresh. It's just good Norm McDonald's stand up. You don't want to talk it up too much other than saying that it's the best thing, right. Yeah, I'm actually downplaying it right now. That's how good it is. Yeah, I gotta check that out. Alright, so back to it. We actually started off talking about tsunamis and we veered

off right back in it. Now are back in it, so or we'll talk about some of the more famous tsunamis, like they've definitely been in the public consciousness over the last in this millennium so far, just because there's been

two colossally huge ones that cause so much destruction. Um. Which is ironic because we're finally now getting to the point where we can warn people early about a tsunami, and yet two of the worst tsunamis in history, whether it's through the human toll or the financial toll, occurred within eight years of each other, within the last twenty years. It's it's kind of surprising. What you know a little more about tsunamis. Yeah, so uh, and I found our

own article to be pretty good. Actually, well it was written by three people, for goodness, how can that go wrong? Including Robert Lamb. Well, always stand up for that guy's writing. Uh. So, tsunami is uh. We have just discovered the word. First of all, it is the Japanese word obviously uh. And the T s u of tsunami means harbor and the n a m I means waves, and that is what a tsunami is. It is a series of waves generally, or a or a wave. Although we will clear up

it's not exactly what you might think from Hollywood movies. No, it's really really really not. Yeah, but it's in the ocean, obviously, and these things can be as high as a hundred feet and get this, they can travel up to and in fact, the two thousand four tsunami traveled about three hundred miles per hour, and that is not at land, but through the ocean. Three miles. Yeah, and I've actually seen them that they're clocked at six hundred miles per hour. Man,

can you imagine? No? I really can't. And I also have trouble with the math itself, Like there's some weird formula are calculating how fast the tsunami is traveling. But it's a square root of the G force times I know, times the depth of the ocean where the tsunami originated. That's I don't understand how that equals how fast the tsunamis traveling. So I'm just gonna take it for their word that they can get up to six hundred Yeah,

that's crazy. So all right, let's talk about tsunami. So tsunami is a what most people think of as a giant wave. It's not necessarily what you're thinking of, like you said, Chuck, but it is a wave in some way, shape or form, and it follows a lot of the um It has a lot of the same same um traits or characteristics of a wave that you see like on the surface of the ocean when you're sitting there on the beach and the waves are rolling in. Technically

that's it's the same family. That's the little brother of a tsunami. And so any kind of wave has a couple of components to It has the trough, which is the lowest point, has the crest, which is the highest point and and happiest point generally. Yeah, typically that's where the surfers like to hang out. Um, you measure them from the height of the crest to the trough. That's the wave height, right, and then the distance between the crest of one wave and the crest of another is

one wave length. So it's weird to think of because you think of the wave is just like you know, the part that's kind of curving up out of the ocean that you see in like graphic design or something like that. Right, the wave is actually much bigger than that. It goes from the front the top of the crest all the way forward and includes the back of the wave in front of it. Technically that's one wave, and

and it includes the trough and the crest. So bam, that's a wave, whether it's a tidal wave or an ocean so or his wife. Right. And then the frequency, which is uh, what you would call the wave period. Is it the time for two waves in a row

to hit the same point. Yeah, So if you like had a booie and a wave went past and then another wave went past the time between, that's the wave period, right, yeah, or if you were a booy Sure, we should maybe do one on I don't know if it's big enough for a full episode, but undertow would be kind of interesting to cover at some point. I'm surprised we haven't

done that one either. Yeah, that's uh. Last time I was at in Charleston, Day two and three were fine, but that first day was an incredible undertow and they even talked about it on the news. It was pretty dangerous. Yeah, so were you in the water, Oh, Yeah, I was having fun. But it's one of those things where you're playing in the water and you look up it's like, wow, Emily is a mile away. Now, yeah, that's very dangerous. It was really carrying me down the beach and the

skin has been peeled off your ankles and calves. Well, yeah, you're just fighting through it, right until you eventually say, I'm forty seven years old, What the heck am I doing. I'm gonna go lay down right with a with a gin and tonic, right, So you've got to figure it out, Chuck. You know that I have my moments. So when we're talking about waves on an ocean. Back to waves, by the way, when when you're talking about waves on an ocean, like the waves people normally think of, um, those are

actually generated by wind. And we definitely talked about this somewhere before. Yeah, it's pretty interesting because I think most people think of gravitational pull and things like that atmospheric pressure and they contribute, but wind is kind of the most common way that a wave will form, right, And it does so by basically on a molecular level. And this this article really goes into granular detail, but basically air molecules push water molecules along and create these circular patterns.

Not circular on top of the surface, but if you're looking at like a cross section of the water, circular from the top into the water, usually down about a meter underwater, and they can get higher and higher as the wind gets stronger and stronger, right, yeah, And these little guys are known as capillary waves, which is the

cutest wave, I guess. Uh. And then they just keep circling around vertically like you said, until eventually it you know, it's sort of dissipates the deeper it goes, obviously it does. But so depending on how strong the wind is, when that wave starts to whip up and froth up and and and get like the back to it, right, yeah, it's it has more surface for the wind to press on.

So the wind now can push it along even further, so it can pick up height, speed, velocity, all that jam and it can get kind of big and they can get kind of fast. But the point is this, what you're seeing is now water being pushed along. What you're seeing is the transfer of kinetic energy from the wind into water, and what a wave is the movement of that energy. Through water. Yeah, it's an important distinction.

I think there really is, because if you if you are at one point and you see a wave and you touch it, and you somehow scramble forward and catch it, when it's like fifty yards down or towards shore, you touch it again, you're actually touching two different bits of water. That's not the same water moving from point A to point B. It's the energy moving through it, and it is. It's it's it's a bit of a brain buster if you start to overthink it, but it's also extraordinarily simple

if you don't. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so that's that's a wave. Okay, that's a surface wave. Tsunamis are not like that. No, And if you if you want to understand how a tsunami is for armed and I think we talked about this in earthquakes as well, which is why it all rings so familiar. But that is not always, but that is generally what kicks off in in in the case of the most too recent devastating ones, what kicks off the tsunami will be an underwater earthquake, and

those happen. If you took out all the ocean's water, you would really just need to think of the sea floor just like you would the rest of ah, the hard stuff on the earth. Yeah, well put you know what I'm saying, Yeah, no I do. It's like if you're on a on a mountain and you come to a valley, it's the same thing that's just underwater. Yeah. So, like this is where we talk about plate tectonics, that we have these huge plates, a series of them that

make up what's called the lithosphere. Uh, and that is the top layer of the Earth, and they make up everything that you see, including what's underwater, and they float on top of the Stennis year. Do you think I said that correctly? I think so. And I remember talking about this is sort of a is that the lube? Yeah, the hot magma lube. So because it's it's not exactly lub, but it's almost like hot asphalt more, you know what I'm saying. Like it's a solid, but it's a very

viscous solid. Right, And so those plates float on top of the athenisphere, and there are boundaries between the plates, and where those boundaries connect, all sorts of things can happen. Right. You can have one plate going upward while the other plates going downwards, so they're sliding alongside each other. You can have one um, you can have them pushing up into one another, and you have mountain ranges. Then you can have ones where one slips under another one and

that creates ocean trenches when it's underwater. But you have to think about this. This isn't happening quickly. This happens at the rate of about um an inch, about two and a half centimeters per year. That's how slowly these things are moving when they're interacting with one another. Yeah, but they're they're huge, and it's a lot of force even though it's going slow. So what you were talking

about is subduction. UM. And sometimes in cases of subduction, you can have a lighter plate that just sort of snaps upward. Uh, when they meet each other and they say hi, lighter plate snaps up, and that's what causes the earthquake and a tremendous amount of of rock and force shoot directly upward from the floor of the ocean. Right, So now a tsunami has just been born, because that's what it is. Right with a normal wave, you've got wind blowing the water or wind blowing through the water.

You have with a tsunami, this huge release of energy upward through the water column towards the surface. And this this energy is like, yeah, we're going up and right when it hits the surface, it really comes in contact with gravity that says no, you're not. They go, yeah, okay, we're going outward then, and they it spreads outward. And this article gives a great analogy because it really drives home what we're dealing with here. If you take a pebble and you throw it into a pond, it makes

that ripple. Right, it's the same exact thing, but rather than a rock going into the water, this is the force of of um an earthquake under the water going upward out right. And so that upward out movement that is the tsunami waves that are being created, and it spreads outward in different ripples, just like if you throw a rock in the pond. Should we take a break? I think we should. I'm getting kind of worked up now. I love it. Uh, it's the earth sciencest man, that's

your jam. Yeah they yeah, that's true. All right. So we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about the speed of a tsunami and how that happens right after this off? You know, stop, you know stop? All right, So when we left off, I promised talk of tsunami speed, and this is where it gets a little like, uh, this is where like if you've learned it from movies, then you've probably learned the wrong thing. Because the tsunami

moves the fastest in deep water. So when a tsunami is going three hundred miles an hour, and and you're of course you're monitoring things, which we'll talk about with all all sorts of advanced equipment. But if you're just looking with your naked eye, and the tsunami is going at three miles an hour through the ocean, you might see like a three ft high if that on the

surface of the of the ocean. Where you where things really take action is when it gets close to shore, because it really slows down and it gets a lot taller because it's shallower water, right like the the shelf, the coastal shelf that gets shallow and shallower pushes it upward, so it slows and grows taller. Right, Yeah, depending on the topography of what's going on. Wherever the tsunami is reaching shore, it's gonna have a big difference, of course.

But the point is is it's compressing all this energy upward as it gets closer and it slows down, and it's like it's very difficult to to grasp how enormous the tsunami um waves are, especially considering that what like three ft like a meter maybe of of surface water will be disturbed to to look like a wave like a normal wave, right, but that wave goes all the

way down to the ocean floor, often miles. So you have basically what amounts to a three mile tall wave that's a tsunami rather than you know, a wave that you see on the surface it's maybe six ft tall, and then it's disturbing water three ft under the water. This is a three mile tall wall of water moving out in a ripple formation in in what's called the wave train. So successive waves like those ripples spreading out from that pebble um that are three miles tall and many, many,

many miles across, just coming at you. Basically, Yeah, and when I said slow down, you know, thirty to forty at land is still really fast. Obviously it's not three but um, you know, right before this tsunami happens on land, it can be really creepy. On shore, You're gonna notice this beach water rising and falling in a odd ways, and sometimes it will suck all that water out. And I believe that movie, Uh The Impossible, didn't it show that.

I don't know, I've seen that in a movie and it's really creepy looking, and apparently that's it is actually very creepy looking in real life too. It's not like a movie thing. It can suck all that water out, and it may not look like a movie wave coming in. It's more likely to look like just a huge flood coming your way right right, like a very fast moving tide, which is I think one reason people call them tidal waves, even though the tides have nothing to do with it.

But it doesn't look like that huge wave that you see in like um the Day after Tomorrow or something like that. It's it's it's like a very fast moving, fast rising flood water. And this on this fast moving floodwater you have like huge raging rivers on top of the water too. It's just this huge, chaotic, massive water that is um that is moving inland very quickly and

with an enormous amount of destructive force. Yeah, and then once it gets there, depending on where it lands, you might have like areas that were you think are sheltered because of high dunes, or you're in an inlet or a bay. Sometimes they can act as like funnels. Like if the tsunami goes through there, you just don't know what kind of destructive power it's going to have until it interacts with the topography and the land features that it hits. No, but it does do some interesting stuff.

So um when So, first of all, that one thing where the the bay or the harbor or whatever gets the water sucked out of it's called drawback, and they've studied that and actually concluded what you're seeing is the trough of the way. That's the trough of the first tsunami wave. So if that's the part that reaches land first, the trough, that's gonna have drawback. So it's not always going to have drawback, just only if the trough drives first.

The crest could arrive first, and then all you're seeing is this floodwater coming out of nowhere. But um, there's also supposedly the sound of a freight train or a jet coming at you. So it's like a horrific sound too, that's coming with this wall of water. But one of the other things, um, I think you're about to talk about was wrap around effect. Yeah, and that's along like a coastline. When I sort of I sort of thought of it as like, uh, or maybe it's harbor resonance.

Like I'm not sure which is which. But when you have like a fish tank and you imagine just shaking it with your all your force and it's just banging off of interior walls, is that around No, that's harbor resonances. But that is so you know when you're doing that, right, Like, it just picks up more and more forced with each movement,

each oscillation from one side to the other. Right Imagine, I know they're like, please stop, surely this is illegal, um, but they imagine that happening in the harbor, like that's what happens in the harbor. So it just gets even more destructive. But the wrap around effect, this article just totally completely gets it wrong. It's not the wraparound effect

at all. So the referround effect is if you have a tsunami wave, remember these are many many miles across and they're coming inland if they encounter, say like a barrier island. This is a little island, right, You would think that the barrier island would slow it down, maybe make it, um take it a little easier on the land the shoreline behind the barrier island. It doesn't do

that at all. The barrier island actually amplifies the tsunami wave and they couldn't figure out how, but they knew that it could amplify it by like but it doesn't make any sense. So they started studying it. And I'm not sure who someone's gonna call them they for now, but um, they they figured out what happens is the tsunami wave is split into two by this island, and for a very brief time, when they come back together,

they are basically doubled in force. It's like two waves together now with this force, and it amplifies it onto the land behind it and makes it way worse. That kind of makes sense if a picture it in my head. Well, they actually do have cool pictures of it too, I think on a Noah site. So look up like wrap around effects tsunamis and it shows like you know, just part one, two, three, four and all these I think

six pictures and it really drives at home. But I mean, it definitely does make sense, but it also intuitively doesn't at all, you know. Yeah, And you know, obviously they've been in the news in the last like ten or fifteen years, like you said, and the devastation that can happen from a tsunami is just it's immense because people live along coastlines and and we'll get to early warning later, but no matter what kind of early warning you have, you making get some people out of there, but it's

gonna wreck everything in its path. And that happened very famously recently a couple of times. In December twenty six, two thousand four, in the Indian Ocean, there was a massive nine point one magnitude earthquake that apparently it shook buildings twelve hundred miles away in Thailand. Yeah, that's a big one. And they always you know, the I guess the big mac version of earthquakes is Hiroshima bombs, right, the magnitude of twenty three thousand Hiroshima atomic bombs. Yeah. No,

small earthquake, no, not at all. I think the next most recent one was in nineteen sixty. The next biggest one is in nineteen sixty and it was like a nine point four to nine point six, and this is a nine point one, So it was no sloutch as far as earthquakes go. But the thing about this, the two thousand four um earthquake that hits Sumatra, it was one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. It killed like about two hundred and thirty thousand people and

ruined No. I can't like if you go through the list of like deadly tsunamis over history. Um. I mean the next the next largest I saw was one in Japan in um. I think that yeah, the nineteenth century that killed twenty thousand people, so a tenth of the two thousand four tsunami. And the reason why it was so deadly was it hit eleven different countries that were

fully engorged with tourists on the holiday season. Um, so there were a lot of people there, including a lot of people who had never really been introduced to tsunami preparedness or knew what was going on. If there was drawback,

and I think there may have been. Actually I think I saw a footage of the drawback for that one, So you're right, Um, people were kind of like going out into the harbor, like, what's this And when that happens, when the drawback happens and you're seeing the trough of that first tsunami wave, you have seconds, maybe minutes to get away, not go closer to it. Yeah, but it wouldn't have made a difference in that case. Probably not.

You know, it hit and it was enormous and huge, and uh yeah, it just it killed a lot of people very quickly, because even if you do have the time to do it, you have to get no less than a mile inland and or no less than a hundred feet above sea level, and you have a very short time to do that. So my friend Dave Barnhart, who listens to the show, Hey Dave, he is a documentary filmmaker UM for nonprofits, and he he went down there and did a series of documentary updates over the years.

He and I can't remember how many people, but he followed specifically the lives an aftermath of of several different individuals and families. Uh, and you know, went down there himself and shot this stuff, I believe in Indonesia, and um, I don't know if he's still following up but he did it for many years and I saw a lot of this stuff and he won some awards for it. Is just just unbelievable, the stories of devastation and then perseverance for some of these people that like started over

with nothing in the worst, most unsanitary, devastating conditions. You can imagine living in, Yeah, I can. I was gonna say, I can image me. I can't imagine. Yeah, I mean, it's just heartbreaking to see this stuff, like quarter a million people. It's just it's hard to even fathom. There. Um, there's this one story you mean got obsessed with at the time him about a kid named baby eighty one.

He was like the eighty first baby to be brought into I think a hospital in Sri Lanka or something afterward, and there was this huge like media publicity circus around whose kid it was, and supposedly they're reporting that there was like nine different families claiming him and there was a huge battle over it, when really it was just this one poor family who knew that it was their son and who went to go make a claim, but they they actually got arrested for trying to take the

baby out of the hospital and had to wait like a month before they got him back through like a d n A test. But it's just like like, first of all, tsunami. Secondly, their baby gets swept away out

of the mom's arms in the tsunami. And then when they finally find out the babies alive, they go to take him back and they can't, and just like the idea that that they have to prove that it's their son, it just kept getting worse and worse and worse, and apparently they had to move because they were known as the Tsunami Family. Here's the last little bit for you. They went and appeared on Good Morning America in the

United States and told their story. When they got back, they were denied disaster aid because everyone assumed that they had been paid for their appearance and that they didn't need the money even though they hadn't been paid for it. Isn't that awful? Yeah, I mean, one family that happened to all of that. The story of the movie The Impossible is a true story and an amazing story and uh just a tough movie to watch, you know. Yeah.

So I was thinking back, like I saw that within the last year or so, I think, and I was thinking back to like some of those scenes, and now that I'm thinking about, I'm like, how did they even shoot that stuff? Like how it doesn't make any sense? Like did they did they flood a town somewhere and start filming and the actors in there, because that's what it looks like. For sure? It was. It was pretty

remarkable what they did, like cinematically for sure. But you're absolutely right, it's it's very tough to watch for sure. Uh So that was UM two four and then just what seven or eight years ago in two thousand eleven in March, and we definitely talked about this in nuclear meltdown, but the tsunami that hit Japan, this one had a had a horrific effect in and of itself just from the tsunami. I don't know what the final death toll,

but it was well over four or five thousand. I think I think the official death tolls now at twenty thousand dead. Oh wow, because I knew for a while they were just people missing. Man. I think they finally combined them all and just said twenty thousands the official death toll. The the damage is upwards of three hundred and nine billion US dollars it's the it's the most

expensive natural disaster in history. Well, yeah, and this one was noted not only for its uh for its devastation and for human life and money, but obviously the generation er of the how do you pronounce it? Fukushima Nuclear facility that was where it made. I don't know about the most news, but that's what really set this one apart. You had a tsunami disable a nuclear reactor for a

brief time, which is bad news. Yeah, it's like it's shut down like it should because I guess they had seismic detectors that are like tripped an automatic like safeguard system, but the power got knocked out, so there wasn't any cooling system. And it's not like it just goes from incredibly hot nuclear reaction to you know, room temperature immediately. You need to keep cooling it down, and they didn't. And apparently from that meltdown. And I don't remember talking

about this in the episode. This is insane, but the the meltdown created radiation that tore apart the water vapor. That's amazing, and so the hydrogen separated and so the place filled with hydrogen gas and it started exploding and that's what blew a hole in the reactor and created the leak. I don't remember that. That's nuts. I wonder if that was found out afterward and not available to us at the time. I'll bet you're right. That sounds

like something that they like. I don't. I don't even know if at the time we recorded they knew how the breach occurred. Yeah, because we did. We recorded within like a week or so of it happening. I think so. Um, that place is still still like way hot. They're sending they sending robots now. They're trying to figure out what robot to use, and they haven't hit on it quite yet because the place melts robots that go in to

try to clean up mess. Yeah. Yeah, all right, Well we're gonna take another break, talk a little bit about how we're getting better at predicting earthquakes, and then also what it means for marine life. Right after this stop no, you know stuff, you know? Okay, Charles, we're back. I also want to say real quick before we do that. Um, there are two at least two articles, and I believe they're written by the same guy who went and covered the two thousand eleven UM tsunami in the aftermath. One

is called Ghosts of the Tsunami. It's called It's It's I think in the London Review books. It is amazing. It's about how these these people in Japan like live among ghosts as far as they're concerned. They see like ghosts everywhere of their the people who died in the tsunami. It's one of the better articles I've ever read in

my life. The other one is The School Beneath the Wave and that wasn't the Guardian and um it's it tells the tale of this one specific school that um this guy who covered the tsunami knew all these different stories and all these tales um that came out of it, and this one, I believe he says that he um put off writing about until last because it's so terrible because the whole school of children just got swept away by the tsunami, because the grown ups wouldn't listen to

the kids who they'd trained to re respond correctly to a tsunami, and they just wouldn't listen to him, and and it just swept away basically his whole villages group of children. Would they have gotten out, Yeah, if they listened to the kids, probably most of if not all, would have survived. Man. Yeah, it's it's a tough one to read, for sure, but both of them are definitely

worth it. Uh So when it comes to predicting these um obviously in the same with earthquakes and tornadoes in any natural disaster, what they're trying to do is just get better and better about getting as much time beforehand as possible. Because, uh then this article very simply points out, like there's you cannot stop it. There's nothing you can do. You can't build anything that can thwart or divert a tsunami.

So the only chance that people have a survival is getting as early warning as possible to get as many people out of there as possible. We'll still destroy the towns and villages and cities, but at least you could save some human lives. And unfortunately a lot of I mean, it's getting much better, but most of the studying takes place afterward, so you can try and get better about before. Yeah, and one way that you study tsunamis is through things

like UM eyewitness reports. Yeah, you go, you go look to see how high the debris made it up to. Yeah, and how far it went, Yeah, how wide it was. Um, some of the debris will end up like on the other side of the world. Old sometimes if the tsunami is big enough, because remember you hear about the tsunami where it hit, you know, the closest place to place it devastated the most, whether it was Sumatra in two

dozen four or um Japan in two dozen eleven. But like that, say, like the japan one, it took it carried stuff all the way over to California, like it goes in both directions. It's just California was way further away, so it didn't experience the destruction like Japan did, which was right up on the place where it happened. Yeah. So you know, equipment wise, they use UM buoys out in the ocean, They use tide gauges. They have tide stations that measure just the smallest little changes in sea level.

They do have seismograph stations that record you know, underwater earthquake activity UM and anything apparently that's seven point five or higher that is under the ocean. Earthquake wise, is when an official tsunami watches issued, right, so when the tsunami watches issued, then you won't hear about it quite yet. They that means that they start checking out their gauge stations.

And if the gauge station reports a tsunami, right, um, I think it's I don't know if it's a I guess it's a change in tide is what the gage station measures, right, So if there's a sudden change in tide that doesn't coincide with the title schedules, will say, yeah, that's a tsunami, send out the alarm and then they alert every like the public through text messages or TV or you know, the Paul Revere. However they do it, how early can they do? You know, how early they

can get this stuff? Now? I I saw minutes for for the two thousand eleven one, which like that's all that In some cases, that's all you need. If you're in a tall building, you just keep going up, that can help. Or if you are close enough, you're getting your car and start driving as far inland as you can.

Minutes can help. And they actually think that the death toll would have been way higher in Japan had they not learned as much from the two thousand four tsunami and set up emergency systems like they had that the death toll would have been much worse. It's just the reason why it got as high as twenty thousand is because it was such a big tsunami, like it topped like a hundred and almost a hundred and thirty feet. It was just enormous. That's that's what accounted for the

destructive force. Yeah, And the whole time I was researching this stuff, I didn't see anything in our article that talked about sea life because I was thinking, what's it like to be a fish? When three three hundred mile an hour tsunami rolls through and Uh, it can be devastating, Like the base of the wave can completely change and rewrite the topography of the c floor. Um, really bad

erosion will happen. And the what they called the benthic ecosystem, which is the you know, the very sea bottom ecosystem with all the crustaceans and sea snails and worms and stuff, it can just wreck it. Uh. Coral reefs can be destroyed. Um And in fact, in two thousand four, UH it completely wrecked the coral reefs around the Indian Oceans, coastlines, seagrass beds, mangrove forests, all these wetlands can be super vulnerable and then species invasion, like you were saying, stuff

can move thousands and thousands of miles. That happens with sea life too, so you can get an algae. Uh And in fact they have recorded like algae and other organisms and like oregon that came from Japan that have never been there before. So sometimes that can be bad. Some you know, sometimes it works out and they just say, all right, we'll set up camp here. But they can

displace native species, so that's all a consideration. And could not find anything specifically about literally in the water, like what happens to a whale that's yeah, that's swimming along and then three miles an hour comes through, Like does it just go kaboom and the whale explodes kind of thing because I could kind of see that happening. I don't know, or is it just like being in a washing machine for a minute and then the whale is like what the heck was that all about? What a rush?

Hopefully hopefully chuck let me let me We have some very very sharp listeners who I'll bet some of which are marine biologists, So we want to hear from you guys, what happens to a whale that gets hit by a tsunami. And that's us asking from our eight year old hearts. We're gonna go play with our tonka trucks now while we wait for the answer. Yeah, and of course anything within the you know, I'm not sure how much distance, but anything close to the inland part will just be

washed ashore. So, I mean millions and millions of bits of sea life are now deposited on dry land. Yeah, and we should say so so for the the unfortunate ones. I mean, there, if you're a fish and you're getting smacked around with this debris now like you're getting run into a house, that'll kill you. Um, there's all sorts of obstacles that aren't out in the water that are now in your way because you're being pushed inland in

this huge surge of floodwater. One of the other destructive forces of tsunamis is that they recede and when they received they take all that stuff back out with them too. So maybe your house survived the initial inundation, but it's not necessarily going to survive all that debris being pulled on it. As it's all pulled back outward into the ocean too. They just go from bed to worse, from moment to moment basically. Well, and I don't I think

it slipped by. I don't think we mentioned too that it's no, it's not just that first wave like you can get secondary flood pushes up to like an hour and a half later. Yes, thank you, So that whole wave rain. Right, You get the initial wave, and you get another one or the initial flood water, and then another one another one. Um. Yeah, I saw actually up to like a couple hours later, and people have died going back thinking after the right exactly. They go back

and then it's like nope, here comes around too. Yeah, I can't believe we haven't done this one before. We definitely have. And I looked a bunch. Yeah, I did too. Um And I also tried every word combination I could think of, and nothing came up. I even tried spelling it s o O in a M. I that sounds like us man. Um, I got one more, you're ready. The tallest tsunami wave ever recorded. It was in Lituya Bay, Alaska. It reached five hundred and twenty meters or se dred

and ten ft above sea level. Can you imagine. I mean, that's like the tallest skyscrapers. It's up there for sure, just coming at you. Well, if you want to know more about tsunami's you can search that word. Don't spell it s O O N A M I. It's spelled T, s U and A M. I think uh in the search bar at house touff Works dot com. And since I spelled some stuff, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this story from a nice lady from a

strawberry farmer. How about that? Those are great stories? Hey, guys, stumbled upon your podcast and have become obsessed. My husband and I own a strawberry farm. Doesn't that sound lovely? It really does. What a nice way to live, you know, man, And I recently started listening while I'm working outside. The other day I was walking the fields and listening to an older one on cremation and a story. My mom's dad passed away in the early nineties when I was

very young. Two thousand twelve, my grandma lost the family home in Long Island, New York to Hurricane Sandy. My mom had an additional home in Florida, UH and moved there the following summer, my mom and dad drove out to New York to pack up what was left to the house before it was going to be demolished. My parents found this little wooden box with no labels. But Dad tried to open it and could not, and unknown to my mom at the time, he put it in

the van drove it back home to Wisconsin. When my mom found it, she asked my grandma what it was and she replied, Oh, yeah, that's your father. I'm just trying to do my best long Island accent. Needless to say, they were glad that they were unsuccessful in opening the box. My mom rightfully labeled the box and now we all get to see Grandpa every time we visit their home.

Thanks for entertaining me while I walked up and down rows of strawberries, checking on plants and weeds eight acres at a time by hand, mother lawn or hand prune ten acres of strawberry plants. She's just rubbing it in now. Ps. We ever do a show in Milwaukee? Well, Danielle Clark, we have done a show in Milwaukee and it was great, So I'm sure we'll come back at some point. Yeah, or maybe both, because I think we found out like they don't actually drive down the road to one another.

It's weird. It is weird. Well, if you have a great story about something we talked about, like dan Yelle thinks by the way, Danielle Um, if you want to let us know about it, you can tweet to us. We're all over Twitter. You can check us out on Facebook or on that too. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and as always, joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.