Comment by hsbauauvhabzb
7 days ago
Is height the only thing that matters? Presumably 1x 2m wave is less impactful than 10 x 1m waves spread 20 seconds apart?
7 days ago
Is height the only thing that matters? Presumably 1x 2m wave is less impactful than 10 x 1m waves spread 20 seconds apart?
I'm surprised so many people don't understand what tsunamis are. It's a "wave" created by a sudden shift in the Earth's crust. Imagine, suddenly, water on each of side of that split is now at different heights and has to equalize. It's much closer to just removing a dam that is holding back water equal in height to the new difference between the sea floors.
What you get is not a "wave" but a wall of water.
> What you get is not a "wave" but a wall of water.
Its a wave (or series of waves) with a large wavelength and speed in deep ocean, that becomes a shorter wavelength and very large amplitude by shoaling as it hits shallow water.
Its different from typical wind-driven ocean waves for a lot of reasons; but a big indicator is wavelength -- wind-driven ocean waves have wavelengths up to hundreds of meters, tsunamis have wavelengths (in deep ocean) of hundreds of kilometers.
More like tides than waves, as has been stated elsewhere in the thread, is both technically wrong but substantively (with the caveat that "waves" really means "typical wind-drive waves") correct, in that tides are also manifested through waves, but waves which have wavelengths of thousands of kilometers, and so tsunamis are waves more similar to those making up tides (hence the old colloquial use of "tidal waves", which properly refers to the waves manifesting tides, to refer to tsunamis) than to wind-driven waves.
Not true. As the news reporters here in Japan are repeating every few minutes, there will be many waves and they can get bigger over time. They already have, 20-30cm initial waves had 40-60cm later waves.
Waves can get bigger due to earthquakes not being instantaneous or necessarily a single movement, due to amplification by geography, by reflections, by aftershocks, and many other things. The news is suggesting waves lasted about a day for a previous event in a similar area.
> I'm surprised so many people don't understand what tsunamis are.
“I’m Surprised so many people don’t know what ‘X’ is/are isn’t a very nice thing to say. Your comment could have done without that, the rest of it would have been fine.
I don’t take offence. I’m not the most educated, and I don’t live in or near a tsunami prone area, I know about other natural disasters that are relevant to where I live though, maybe more than the parent poster.
I don't think he's even right. Like what he is saying is in actuality wrong. He's surprised because he's ignorant. I'm all for people saying stuff the way he says it. He believes it's true, then he should stand behind. But then the consequence is that he needs to be accepting of when people call him out for being utterly wrong.
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Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1053/
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This doesn't make sense to me intuitively. It must be a wave.
Imagine you have a fault line. There is a left side and a right side to the fault line. If the left side lowers with a shift then that shift MUST be localized to the area around the fault. Because if it wasn't then that means there's an elevation change across the board for everything to the left of the fault. You see how that doesn't make sense? So if the entire country of japan was on the left side of the fault then the entire country of japan shifts in elevation which is unrealistic.
So that means, if what you say is semi-true then the shift in elevation is localized to the area left along the fault but the elevation further left remains the same. It's like a slight dip or bump along the fault line. It must be like this because the alternative is just unrealistic. This MUST be what happens when tectonic plates "shift". You won't see the ENTIRE plate shifting in elevation.
With naive logic, one would think that the water simply fills the localized gap but given how deep the ocean is relative to the actual shift way down in the abyss I'm betting if you were on a boat on top of the fault you wouldn't notice anything. But the movement does create a slight imperceptible "filling" that you don't notice. This is a "wave" but it's invisible.
The wave will translate leftward if the movement of the "shift" was sort of in that direction, but you don't see it. BUT as the sea floor gets nearer and nearer to the surface of the ocean the energy of the wave gets squuezed into less and less ocean water mass (i'm remembering how tsunamis work now) and THEN it becomes visible. Right? Just imagine a sideways cross section. As the tiny wave travels from big ocean with huge depth to coastline with no depth the energy of the wave gets concentrated into a thinner and thinner layer of water.
My intuition just sort of converged with my obscure memory of how tsunamis work so I'm pretty sure this is what's going on.
So it is indeed a "wave" that is acting on wave like phenomena beyond simply "filling a gap". In fact say there's an elevation lowering on the left side of the fault by 1 meter. The resulting wave on the coast line hundreds of miles away will be a wave that extends upward by MORE then 1 meter above sea level which is the opposite of water "filling up a gap." That's totally a wave.
Additionally water from tsunamis always recede. This wouldn't happen if the "wall of water" was simply equalizing. If that's the case the water would never recede.
Any expert who says otherwise, let me know.
edit: Actually why the fuck am I using my intuition to explain it? Just cite a source:
https://www.noaa.gov/explainers/science-behind-tsunamis
tsunamis are 100% waves as explained in the link. Anyone who says otherwise clearly doesn't know what they are talking about, that includes the person I'm responding to. End of story.
Yes, they are waves, but they are often very long waves. A typical 1m wave might be 20m long. A tsunami wave might be a kilometer long or longer. That is why people say they are like a tide. The wave arrives, then does not recede for several minutes. So, while a 4m wind driven wave might break over a seawall and even wash a car off the road, a 4m tsunami washes ships over that same seawall and floods the city.
It’s a wave, but it is often not at all like a regular ocean wave. I’ve been at sea when a 3m tsunami passed, we barely felt it. If it had been a 3m wind wave in that otherwise calm sea, it would have knocked dinner off the table.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAFYVpX45xs
Here's a video of what it looks like from the 2011 event, from the POV of the coast guard approaching it. Waves don't typically look like a sheet has been flapped across one front of the entire horizon of what is visible on the ocean
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Yeah, they are waves I think. Just, really incredibly big waves with lots of mass behind them. I think people want to say “not a wave” to emphasize the fact that they are much bigger than the waves that the local environment is used to, so they can be really surprising.
Since we're intuiting, I'm just imagining something like quickly adding a "D.C. offset" of some given height to the crests and troughs you'd measure by sampling ocean waves.
In fact, I'm not sure I should have quotes around that. Isn't your interlocutor saying a tsunami is literally a direct current of water flowing toward the shore?
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Maybe the easiest way is explain it by volume of water coming at you. A 'normal' wave comes at you for maybe 2-5 seconds, then recedes. A tsunami wave might come at you for what, a few minutes? So moves more than 20x-50x the water than an equivalent 'normal' wave, which has no other way to go?
Sure it's a wave, but tides, swells and waves all oscillate just on different frequencies and amplitudes. When they all align you get rogue waves and to the casual observer of a tsunami, a wall of water coming your way.
Tsunamis are waves the same way a step function is the sum of a series of waves.
> If the left side lowers with a shift then that shift MUST be localized to the area around the fault. Because if it wasn't then that means there's an elevation change across the board for everything to the left of the fault. You see how that doesn't make sense
Yo heard of fluid dynamics? Good luck localizing this;) maybe you can build a wall or something real quick
Obviously it is all technically waves. Even if EVERYTHING to the left lowered we would be talking about waves caused by it. But it don't need to be all lowered because waves propagate. And point is these particular waves, tsunami are not the waves you think about because you saw some on the beach. It's an ocean rising for a while. Watch some vids to get a vibe for it.
Despite the common vernacular calling them "waves" they're really more like really really high tides. You're talking about something that happens over, say, 10-90 minutes, not seconds.
This is also in many ways what makes them so deadly in places that aren't used to tsunamis. It often just looks like a regular wave or a tide that will imminently break or recede, but they never do. Here [1] is a video of one of the later waves of Thailand's 2004 tsunami.
Even worse is tsunamis are also often preceded by a 'disappearing coast' effect where the water will recede back into the ocean for hundreds of meters. This often drives tourists or locals who don't know better to go check out the sea bed and the weird behavior of the ocean, then the tsunami comes in and they're right in the middle of it.
If you're ever at a beach where the water starts rapidly disappearing, yell tsunami and get away as fast as you can. Ignore the normalcy bias, because most people, even locals, will be just standing around taking videos or even walking out into it. And don't stop running even when you're well away from the beach. It's nature's warning sign.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO7TZFBAlaE
>Here [1] is a video of one of the later waves of Thailand's 2004 tsunami
If that is the one of December 2004, it affected not just Thailand, but also many other countries around the Indian Ocean:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake...
Excerpts:
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami
On 26 December 2004, at 07:58:53 local time (UTC+7), a major earthquake with a magnitude of 9.2–9.3 Mw struck with an epicentre off the west coast of Aceh in northern Sumatra, Indonesia. The undersea megathrust earthquake, known in the scientific community as the Sumatra–Andaman earthquake,[8][9] was caused by a rupture along the fault between the Burma plate and the Indian plate, and reached a Mercalli intensity of IX in some areas.
A massive tsunami with waves up to 30 m (100 ft) high, known as the Boxing Day Tsunami after the Boxing Day holiday, or as the Asian Tsunami,[10] devastated communities along the surrounding coasts of the Indian Ocean, killing an estimated 227,898 people in 14 countries, violently in Aceh (Indonesia), and severely in Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu (India), and Khao Lak (Thailand). The direct result was major disruption to living conditions and commerce in coastal provinces of surrounding countries. It is the deadliest natural disaster of the 21st century,[11] one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history, and the worst tsunami disaster in history.[12] It is also the worst natural disaster in the history of Indonesia, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand.[13]
It is the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Asia, the most powerful earthquake in the 21st century, and the third or second most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the world since modern seismography began in 1900.[14][a] It had the longest fault rupture ever observed, between 1,200 km and 1,300 km (720 mi and 780 mi), and had the longest duration of faulting ever observed, at least ten minutes.[18] It caused the planet to vibrate as much as 10 mm (0.4 in),[19] and also remotely triggered earthquakes as far away as Alaska.[20] Its epicentre was between Simeulue and mainland Sumatra.[21] The plight of the affected people and countries prompted a worldwide humanitarian response, with donations totalling more than US$14 billion[22] (equivalent to US$23 billion in 2024 currency).
I was around (in India) at the time, but not near the coast, much further inland and to the north, so was not affected.
They are very literally long wavelength waves though.
Yes, they are waves, but they are often very long waves. A typical 1m wave might be 20m long. A tsunami wave might be a kilometer long or longer. That is why people say they are like a tide. The wave arrives, then does not recede for several minutes. So, while a 4m wind driven wave might break over a seawall and even wash a car off the road, a 4m tsunami washes ships over that same seawall and floods the city.
It’s a wave, but it is often not at all like a regular ocean wave. I’ve been at sea when a 3m tsunami passed, we barely felt it. If it had been a 3m wind wave in that otherwise calm sea, it would have knocked dinner off the table.
So are tides.
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They are waves, but they don't behave like the sort of waves we are used to. This is the source of all the confusion.
I have heard description of a tsunami being "a temporary rise in sea level", which describes its behavior much more intuitively. A tsunami that tops a sea wall will flood the entire lower-lying area behind it. A usual wave, even a tall one, will only deposit some splashes of water behind the wall and go away immediately.
It's a distinction without value I think. There are waves, and many of them. There is a rise in the sea level. For anywhere affected, both certainly matter. Like you mentioned, tsunami isn't a brief event. And here in Japan, they are talking about tsunami waves, not a singular tsunami. And talking about sea level rise and checking the local power poles for sea level indicators from previous tsunami events and floods.
I is absolutely a VERY valuable distinction because the behavior as it affects humans (up to and including killing them) is VERY different.
Regular waves that are a little higher than your seawall might cause some water damage to the buildings right next to it. A tsunami that is a little higher than your seawall will flood your entire town and drown people who are caught in basements.
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These things are 100% waves. It's not a misnomer. It fits the scientific definition of waves and it fits our intuition of what waves are. These are NOT tides.
https://www.noaa.gov/explainers/science-behind-tsunamis
Yes, they are waves, but they are often very long waves. A typical 1m wave might be 20m long. A tsunami wave might be a kilometer long or longer. That is why people say they are like a tide. The wave arrives, then does not recede for several minutes. So, while a 4m wind driven wave might break over a seawall and even wash a car off the road, a 4m tsunami washes ships over that same seawall and floods the city.
It’s a wave, but it is often not at all like a regular ocean wave. I’ve been at sea when a 3m tsunami passed, we barely felt it. If it had been a 3m wind wave in that otherwise calm sea, it would have knocked dinner off the table.
A tsunami absolutely does not fit our intuition of what waves are. It looks like a wave. But it does not stop. It just continues. That little wave goes on an on, farther and farther inland. After an hour it may still go on. It's a nightmare wave, because it doesn't not fit one's intuition of what waves are.
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Again the only correct comment is downvoted. Watch Tsunamis on Youtube. The water just keeps coming and coming. They are like high tides.
I remember in 2015 watching this great tsunami video at a harbor. It was about 11 minutes long.
At the start, there's just a white line at the horizon. Then the fishing boats in the harbor start rocking and jangling. Then water starts pouring over some walkways and sea walls.
Eventually the cameraman backs away and starts climbing a concrete tower; water starts to flood over the area where they had been standing. I think they climb a couple stories and are safe up there.
I haven't been able to find the video in years, but I remember being fascinated by it and I'd love to watch it again.
Edit: I never expected to find that video again, but here it is. A little more terrifying than I remember.
https://youtu.be/PvJs2iWQuFs
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Ah, and here I was wondering if it would be possible to surf one of these for miles in if the timing were right. The grandparent answers that question.
> Again the only correct comment is downvoted.
I seriously wonder if people brains are being cooked these days. One of the blessing of HN used to be it was full of fairly well educated, and most importantly, curious people. Sometimes with a bit too much of a focus of the technical side of things, but at least on most technical topics the comments where a great place to get a richer understanding of a whatever was being discussed.
A tsunami is not a "bigger" wave like the ones that crash on the beach every minute. A tsunami is a single wave that crashes and crashes and adds more and more and more water for several minutes non stop, not pausing or pulling back for a single second. It is a sudden flood coming from the sea.
A tsunami is a gigantically long wave. I don’t think what you’re describing describes a tsunami.
That is not really a good description of a tsunami. Tsunamis can occur in very narrow areas too, like when landslides happen in fjords.
I mean long as in wavelength. You wouldn’t have a series of tsunami waves.
Depends on topography and protections in place. 10 1m waves against a sound 1.5m seawall is no big deal. 1 2m wave against the same seawall could be a problem.
Velocity of wave as well.