We’ve all seen the gut-wrenching videos of thick sheets of ocean pushing and pouring their way through towns like liquid bulldozers miles wide and as high as three story buildings, carrying ships, cars, and buildings like leaves in the gutter on a rainy day.
A fine, understated sensitive, and vivid account of what remains after such a thing:
- Asahi Shimbun – Narumi Ota, Daisuke Ono: Half of coastal town’s residents are missing ; Filed form Minami-Sanriku.
The videos of this community’s destruction, and that of many others exposed to the full power of the earthquake’s oceanic offspring, are telling.
I’m in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, hence read much of the news in the LA Times delivered to our daughter’s home. One explainer in that paper, giving readers a sense of what a tsunami is, got most of it right, but a few aspects seemed off:
- LA Times (Mar 12) Amina Khan: The science of tsunamis:
These are little things, and this is not the only story that doesn’t seem to describe how an ocean-spanning tsunami behaves while moving through deep water between the time it’s kicked off to its encounter with a distant continental shelf or island. Ms. Khan, an able reporter, describes the waves traversing the sea as “little higher than ripples.” That’s a fact, but the word ripple in it is a mistake. And she calls the hump in the sea over a suddenly heaving tectonic plate as a “tiny mountain, perhaps a yard in height.” Both sentences may lead readers to picture things not only short, but not particularly broad. Further, the story describes the pile-up of a swell miles wide from trough to trough in the open sea as an impasse for “the rapidly moving water.” In mid-ocean, the water is hardly moving at all, merely subtly rising and falling as the wave goes by.
I am unsure the best way to phrase these things perfectly. But to evoke images of mid-ocean ripples, and fast-moving streams hitting barriers, is not it.
For that matter, there is no blocking this metaphor but describing a tsunami coming ashore as a wall of water is to not quite capture the event either. It is more like a plateau of water, or a rise in sea level that pours inland. Walls are narrow barriers. A tsunami is as though the sea has risen on its legs and comes in not as a wave, but a flood. It is instantaneous high tide, higher than any ordinary wave. A wall is basically two dimensional – height and length, not much width. A tsunami has all three. One often sees the term surge applied, and that’s a better and more evocative term than wall.
By the way, some pics of the areas where towns once were seem to show portions of them still flooded, even right to the sea’s edge. Somebody should check to see if there has been significant subsidence of the land following the release of pent-up strain by the earthquake’s thrust. Some of those towns’ old locations may now be permanently submerged. And some ports may find themselves suddenly, markedly shallower or even stranded.
– Charlie Petit
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