the rix mix

Here's an incredible video of the tsunami hitting American Samoa. Relentless. Tsunamis are terrifying & fascinating, Weather science now provides advance warning of most river floods & storm surges, so most of the deaths outside of third world nations are people who refused to exacuate or the fools who drive into floods. Tsunamis are something else. not meterological. But even the tsunami warning systems being installed around the Indian & Pacific Oceans would not have helped the Samoans, or any coast only minutes from an earthquake epicenter. How fast a tsunami advances after it hits a coast, how deep the flooding is, depends upon the coastline itself, the rise of the ground, the rivers & estuaries. In one of the videos from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the water from the first wave rose slowly enough for people to outrun it to high buildings, & the outgoing current when it retreated, after it had picked up debris, was more destructive. The second & third waves were worse.

Labels: in the news, weather