Tsunamis Blog Post

Tsunamis begin with convergent plates and Earthquakes, or even meteors, as would happen frequently happen during the time of the dinosaurs. The way that it starts with convergent plates is when one of the plates either rises or falls that force pushes a tsunami up from the sea. The way that they are created with meteors is completely different but a little easier to understand. A giant meteor falls from the sky, sometimes the size of a 20 storey building and smashes into the ocean. This then lifts up waves all around it and sends tsunamis in every direction. Almost like throwing a pebble into a lake and watching the tiny waves ripple outwards, only on a much more massive scale.

When travelling through the sea, tsunamis can reach an amazing eight hundred kilometres per hour or (for you Americans) around five hundred miles per hour, to put that into perspective that is faster than the fastest road car ever the Bugatti Veyron, which, respectively can reach a top speed of around 430 kilometres per hour, that’s about half of the giant 800 kilometres per hour that the average tsunami achieves in speed. In fact a tsunami can go at about the top speed of a Jumbo Jet, that’s fast enough to cross the Pacific Ocean in less than a day. Tsunamis are only around a foot tall on the open ocean, but when they reach shallower waters, then begin to grow in height. Sometimes on one very rare occasions, to a spectacular 600 meters tall but usually only around 10 meters tall.

Usually with tsunamis the trough, or bottom of the wave reaches the beaches first sucking in all of the sea water along the shore, just to make the wave look a little more big and scary, but this can also help the people living there because along with the 100 foot tall wave you can also see all of the water disappearing from the beach. Luckily though there is a little more effective way of knowing if you should be on Tsunami alert. There are very advanced detectors in Hawaii that can give people an early warning for Tsunamis along with a lot of other places around the ring of fire, which, in case I haven’t already mentioned gets around 80% of the worlds tsunami’s every year.

The world’s largest tsunami happened during the night of July 9th, 1954. An Earthquake on the Alaskan Panhandle fault occurred and the force of it made 31 million cubic meters of rock from Lituya Bay; plunge around a kilometer downwards into the Gilbert Inlet. This rock created a giant tsunami that was 600 meters tall. This tsunami rushed all the way up to 500 meters above sea level uprooting several million trees. Of course the reason why this wave was so huge was because the disturbance landed vertically whereas usually it wouldn’t have such an impact if it was underwater and The earthquake only shoved the wave forwards and not up and then forward.

Another way to detect Tsunamis is by using buoys, there are buoys situated all around the ocean which record the temperature, atmospheric pressure, and wave height in all sorts of regions. The UK has more than one which surprised me at first, until I realized they were oil rigs. These buoys can provide valuable data to inform the people who are in the vicinity of the tsunami to get to safety. In conclusion tsunamis are a very hard thing to avoid unless you are in a developed country which has buoys or some other system. Almost 80% of all of the Tsunami’s around the globe start in the ring of fire. Tsunamis are caused by earthquakes, meteors or volcanoes.

Works Cited

INGVterremoti, INGVterremoti. "TSUNAMI." YouTube. YouTube, 28 Jan. 2011. Web. 12 June 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBkMLYUyUZg>.

"Tsunamis." National Geographic. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 June 2012. <http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/natural-disasters/tsunami-profile/>

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"World's Biggest Tsunami." Geology.com: News and Information for Geology & Earth Science. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 June 2012. <http://geology.com/records/biggest-tsunami.shtml>.

And me for the bit about the Bugatti Veyron and it's speed :)