Page 34 - The Wave News Today

Earth can be. when youre talking about a 30-foot wave traveling at that speed. by the way, in the open ocean, these things travel about 500 miles per hour. as they approach the coastline, the friction from the undersea surface will slow the bottom of that wave down, and you get that crust. you start to see that wave build, just like any other wave would build. the deal with tsunamis is the waves between, from crest to trough, are much, much further apart, and they go much, much faster. therefore...

South coast of america. however, given the winds, it is sensible to put the outlying areas on alert because there is a chance that it could still cause damage around these parts. >> simon, the wave that hit japan was a monster, like ten meters. give us a sense for those not familiar with tsunamis how this can form, how it can happen, a wall of water can hit a city and keep moving. i mean this is the thing. it does not stop. >> it doesnt stop. what happens initially is you get an earth tremor. e ...

Harbor gauge. when you are talking about a gauge or a rise of that much, youre going to see some damage. certainly going to see some damage in there on the north shore of maui. we are looking north. there is the harbor. all of these waves coming in and this is a good example of how the local geography can funnel and amplify the tsunami as it comes further inland. a significant wave increase here on the northern shores of maui and we will be looking at this probably for the big island, too, in th...

Marciano who, i believe, has some news coming out from hawaii. is that it, rob? >> yeah. maui some of the gauges there on the north shore showing significant rise in water. we have seen rise in kauai and now the wave propagates to the south and east rise across northern kauai. kahului that harbor gauge seen a rise of six feet so that is significantly higher than what we have seen the past couple of measurements which have been mostly on southeastern facing shores of the other two islands. here i...

>> kyong, we know that the military has been active as well as naval vessels have been dispatched to the northeast of the country. kn no doubt, as you say, there will be a huge rescue operation under way to try to help the survivors. lets go to ivan whos been following this earthquake from the very beginning. ivan. >> what i want to do is switch over. in fact, to just show you the pictures here, this is a widespread event now, and were going to continue to follow this, because as we speak, there...

Up north, we are getting very different reports. certainly that is a crisis. that is going to be a humanitarian crisis. right now, it is simply a search and rescue operation, a completely different experience up there than what we are seeing here in tokyo. >> kyung lah reporting to us from japan and heading north and we are seeing images from the northern part of the country there of just utter devastation. it looks apocalyptic. >> when you see it on tv it looks like a small wave but take a clos...

Heres the bay. theres kahaluhi. wouldnt expect anything to get there because its kind of in a valley and the wave came this way. look at the wave, up and down. the whole wave went up first. sometimes you think -- we talked about this, the old tsunami back in 2004, how the water went down first. this water did not go down first. this is a positive wave initially, which means that the wave goes up first and then goes down and then back up. thats what it looks like. i know its a raw looking map, bu...

But it could be decades. not only for the west coast but for hawaii as well. so a scary situation. there is a degree of the unknown. how much did the bottom of the ocean floor move? we really dont know. how much does that wave get dissipated as it travels across the ocean floor. what happens as the wave reacts with the ocean bottom as it ramps up towards the hawaiian islands? that will totally affect how far inland it is and how high the wave goes for the u.s. thats the scary part of this. we re...

Disaster going on here. a massive earthquake of historic proportions, quite frankly, one of the largest ones the world has ever seen. an 8.9 magnitude earthquake off the coast of japan. that was disaster number one, if you will. it shook even tokyo some 230 miles away. that triggered, though, a tsuna tsunami, a tsunami thats hit the northern part, just north of tokyo now, and that wave is sweeping through as far inland as 60-plus miles, as we have seen. also has triggered tsunami warnings for at...

Stay right where they are. they are also asking people, hey, stay off the phone. we have a number of lines coming into the islands and things were jammed up. communications were jammed up. they are basically telling people to stay where you are, wait for the all clear, dont go back and experiment. if you look at the ocean and it looks calm, it may be deceiving. you could see the ocean receding back and another wave could come in about 20 minutes or so. >> all right. carter evans, youve been a gr...