Orphan tsunami of 1700–Japanese clues to a parent earthquake in America (2015)
12 comments
·March 28, 2025OgsyedIE
mikhailfranco
Totally agree - watch everything he does!
The students in central Washington have a knowledgeable, eloquent and charismatic teacher. So glad the internet was invented, so that I can also watch NZ.
merek
Thanks for sharing.
I'd also recommend this NHK Documentary on the Fukushima mag 9 quake. Fascinating and disturbing footage
djfivyvusn
70 minutes? Try a few hours, can't stop at one.
johnrob
Great article from The New Yorker about this, also from 2015: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...
llsf
That article scared me. The Cascadia Fault is a scary one. We are not (and arguably cannot really) prepared for an earthquake of that magnitude.
throwaway290
> It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water—not once it reaches the shore.
This is true and why tsunamis are scary af. Take this and try to imagine a taller tsunami https://youtu.be/8zoX9H6xiPo. It's actually hard because it doesn't even feel like a wave of some height. It feels like ocean rising.
Also "we are 300 years into a 250 year disaster cycle" is not a thing you want to read on a Monday. Though it looks like they got the cycle length just by dividing the total years by total number of previous earthquakes, so who knows if it's correct
grakasja
I remember seeing a documentary movie or series episode about this years ago on PBS or something. There was one part with a shot of the Cascadian coastline showing how all the trees lower than a certain point were long dead or much younger than the trees above that line, because of the tsunami 300 yrs ago. Anyone know what that show was?
Arelius
It just showed up on my youtube on the other commenters video, but maybe it was this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1R6B6_2KOk
mikhailfranco
Absolutely beautiful paper.
Yes, it is book length, but every page is a joy.
Here are some quotidian introductory references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_de_Fuca_plate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1700_Cascadia_earthquake
P.S. TLDR; TLDW (video below); I live near the coast in Washington state, should I be worried? - Yes.
TZubiri
That's like 2000km between the EQ and the tsunami, how mind boggingly abyssmal
arccy
Did the orphan tsunami generate a tsunami of orphans though?
If you have 70 minutes of free time on the weekend and want to see one of the greatest geology communicators at their best, Nick Zentner did a lecture at the CWU on Pacific Northwest earthquakes that goes into decent depth about this past quake and tsunami:
https://youtu.be/UJ7Qc3bsxjI
It's better than most TV if you've got the time.