Photos of the ruin, and a question about the tsunami

The Mail has many photographs of the Japan disaster, including wide-angle shots taking in entire devastated towns where only a few buildings remain standing and the rest is mud and wreckage.

How does a tsunami send a wall of mud so far inland with so much force? Is the tsunami a single very high wave, or is it a kind of sustained lifting of the entire ocean, only a few feet high, but—because the entire ocean is behind it—enough to inundate the land far from the shore? I am not talking about how tsunamis are created by earthquakes under the sea floor; I understand that, more or less. I am talking about the nature and characteristics of a tsunami wave as it hits the shore.

Also, how extensive was the damage caused by the earthquake as distinct from the tsunami? News stories have not been clear on that.

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John Dempsey writes:

I just ran into this short piece at American Thinker which tries to explain the force behind a tsunami. It doesn’t answer all of your questions but it does shed some light.

Be sure to check out the photo link that is provided.

LA replies:

Interesting. What Keohane says is similar to what I guessed in my question. I said:

” … or is it a kind of sustained lifting of the entire ocean, only a few feet high, but—because the entire ocean is behind it—enough to inundate the land far from the shore?”

Keohane writes:

“At the very top of the photo is the crest of the wave and the curvature indicating the water falling in front of it. Notice there is no trough behind it. The sea itself has become higher, much higher, than the land, and as such, the tsunami is not running up onto the land but falling down on it.”

The main difference is that he says that the ocean has become much higher than the land, not just a few feet higher than the land.

Now we understand. The tsunami consists of a rise in the level of the entire ocean, or of a large part of it. This raised part of the ocean is moving at fairly high speed, then crashes into the land and falls upon it. This makes it understandable how entire towns can be wiped out, and areas far from the shoreline can be destroyed and covered by moving bodies of mud and debris.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 13, 2011 09:07 AM | Send