Speaker 1: Astonishing Legends Network Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount
Speaker 1: of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect
Speaker 1: around here, but in the event it becomes an unusual amount,
Speaker 1: expect another call from me.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, Welcome back to Scarett All the time. I'm
Speaker 2: Chris Klari, I'm Ed Vicola, and this week we are
Speaker 2: kicking off our season two Summer of Fear with a
Speaker 2: trip to the beach, and not a fun beach. This
Speaker 2: is a very scary beach because all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: when you look out towards the horizon, there doesn't seem
Speaker 2: to be much water here. The seabed looks dry for
Speaker 2: a mile or two. Fish are flopping in the sun,
Speaker 2: and that can only mean one thing. Somewhere out beyond
Speaker 2: that horizon, A massive wave is building up steam and
Speaker 2: when it gets here, there's going to be trouble. This
Speaker 2: week we're talking tsunamis one of the most terrifying ways
Speaker 2: nature has come up with to kill a lot of
Speaker 2: people at the same time, Faster than a hurricane, bigger
Speaker 2: than an earthquake by orders of magnitude, the single deadliest
Speaker 2: category of natural disasters in the twenty first century, so far.
Speaker 2: If you manage to ride the wave all the way
Speaker 2: to the end of this episode with us, you're gonna
Speaker 2: get some very very bad news about a seven hundred
Speaker 2: mile fault line off the west coast of the United
Speaker 2: States that is one of the world's most dangerous ticking
Speaker 2: time bombs. But before we get to all that, I
Speaker 2: should mention ed and I are not alone on this
Speaker 2: doomed beach today. Today, we've got Cassidy and Amanda from
Speaker 2: the Drinking the kool Aid podcast to keep us company
Speaker 2: as we all flee that incoming wall of water moving
Speaker 2: faster than a seven forty seven. So take the higher
Speaker 2: ground with us and make sure your phone is fully
Speaker 2: charged so the episode does not stop halfway through the
Speaker 2: Summer of Fear is about to begin?
Speaker 3: What are we screed? When are we all the times?
Speaker 4: Now?
Speaker 3: Which is time?
Speaker 2: Full time God Scan? All right, guys, welcome back to
Speaker 2: the show. Before we hit the waves, I want to
Speaker 2: take a second to introduce our guests for this episode.
Speaker 2: We have Cassidy and Amanda from Drinking the kool Aid Podcast.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having us. We're excited to
Speaker 4: be here.
Speaker 2: You folks have a very funny podcast and they cover
Speaker 2: lots of scary and weird topics like we do. So
Speaker 2: if you want to go check them out after this episode,
Speaker 2: where can they find you?
Speaker 3: Guys?
Speaker 4: You can find us at Drinking the kool Aid podcast
Speaker 4: on Instagram or really anywhere social media wise, but you
Speaker 4: can find us anywhere you listen to your podcast just
Speaker 4: Drinking the kool Aid. Kool Aid all one word.
Speaker 2: And needs two have been at this a lot longer
Speaker 2: than we have.
Speaker 3: I mean, their studios so nice. Their studio is so nice.
Speaker 2: We just recorded some episodes or not some episodes we guessed.
Speaker 3: I don't like it.
Speaker 2: We were there for a while today recording. They've got
Speaker 2: hundreds and hundreds of episodes out. So when this is
Speaker 2: over and you're like, damn, I need to hear more,
Speaker 2: you know, wherever you're listening to this show, go listen
Speaker 2: to their show. So before you do that, though, let's
Speaker 2: talk tsunamis. I assume most people are probably familiar with
Speaker 2: the basics of a tsunami. It is really just a
Speaker 2: big wave. But Ed, I never know what you will
Speaker 2: or won't know on this show, So we'll start with
Speaker 2: the basics to make sure that we are all on
Speaker 2: the same page. According to the US Geographic Service, quote,
Speaker 2: tsunamis are ocean waves triggered by a variety of things,
Speaker 2: from large earthquakes that occur near or under the ocean,
Speaker 2: to volcanic eruptions to submarine landslides, by which I think
Speaker 2: they mean landslides that occur sub.
Speaker 3: Beneath the waves. I thought that was when I first
Speaker 3: read out all those submarines are coming down the hill.
Speaker 3: That's what I thought.
Speaker 2: I was imagining a pile of submarines landsliding. But I
Speaker 2: think they mean almost like sub mariner landslides.
Speaker 3: But sure that didn't help me at all. I mean,
Speaker 3: I have a superhero my head.
Speaker 2: Even on shore landslides that throw large volumes of debris
Speaker 2: into the water can cause tsunamis because all of these
Speaker 2: events displace mind bogglingly immense amounts of water, and that
Speaker 2: water has to go somewhere, oftentimes racing out in all
Speaker 2: directions to collide with the nearest shoreline. Scientists don't use
Speaker 2: the term title wave when describing Sonama.
Speaker 3: I remember title waves, I do. They were a thing
Speaker 3: for a minute. I feel like that was a term
Speaker 3: i'd hurt.
Speaker 4: Tidle wave is definitely something I've heard before. Also like
Speaker 4: rogue wave, but that's a different thing.
Speaker 2: Okay it is, and we're actually going to talk about
Speaker 2: rogue waves in a minute. I don't know why title
Speaker 2: waves got so popular in.
Speaker 3: I don't know. It's a sudden the language change in
Speaker 3: the nineties.
Speaker 2: I feel like, like Hershey Park has a water ride
Speaker 2: called Title Force, or like a tide typhoon lagoons.
Speaker 3: I'll get into. That's my first getting hurt by a wave.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say. I feel like tidle wave was
Speaker 4: the name of my local water parks, like the wave
Speaker 4: pool was called tidal wave.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there are tidal waves. They are giant waves
Speaker 2: caused by the tides.
Speaker 5: But nowhere near as big as a soon nowhere near
Speaker 5: as big or as dangerous as I do like a
Speaker 5: theme park, that's like, we're not going to be able
Speaker 5: to do like tsunami size rides.
Speaker 2: Let's just well, especially after the title two thousand and four,
Speaker 2: you can't be calling anything tsunami.
Speaker 3: We're going to get into it, don't worry. I got
Speaker 3: some thoughts.
Speaker 2: But unlike typical ocean waves that are generated by wind
Speaker 2: and storms, tsunamis don't break the way that curling wind
Speaker 2: generated waves that are popular with surfers do. So you know,
Speaker 2: when you picture a big wave, you're picturing that curl.
Speaker 2: That is not a tsunami at all. No curl tsunami,
Speaker 2: no curl.
Speaker 3: Okay, there you go. Now you know the women.
Speaker 6: Now I don't even I genuinely don't know what I'm
Speaker 6: looking at now. Then it's just a big like a
Speaker 6: mountain moving like it's a roll.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's more of a wall.
Speaker 3: Wall Again, only anyone who saw it lived.
Speaker 2: We well to ask, we should say, I guess we've learned.
Speaker 2: Something we learned earlier today talking to Cassidy is that
Speaker 2: Cassidy is a big weatherhead.
Speaker 4: Weahead crazy.
Speaker 2: Tsunamis aren't really weather, but they are natural disasters. And
Speaker 2: I feel like there's a lot of crossovers. So I
Speaker 2: feel like on this uppisode, Cassidy is gonna have some
Speaker 2: knowledge to drop, and you're gonna have a lot to
Speaker 2: learn ed.
Speaker 6: I will say, if you're watching this episode, she will
Speaker 6: be covered behind your hand.
Speaker 3: Because I'm waving all I said, I've only seen.
Speaker 4: That's how I like to keep it personally. Listen, it's
Speaker 4: never good.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's probably why I had all the things
Speaker 3: set up the way they were. Amanda. I feel like
Speaker 3: we step on your.
Speaker 5: Yeah, something you did something. Cassidy also loves more than
Speaker 5: anything in the entire world is the ocean.
Speaker 3: So she yes, that's an unusual around here.
Speaker 6: Really, most people hear ocean they go Whenever we have
Speaker 6: guests like what we want to talk about what scares you,
Speaker 6: it's almost always ocean.
Speaker 5: Well that scares me.
Speaker 3: There you go. Perfect.
Speaker 4: So I have had the tsunami nightmare though before, where
Speaker 4: you're on a beach and you can't get off and
Speaker 4: you can see the wall of water coming. That's like
Speaker 4: a that's like a reoccurring nightmare.
Speaker 3: I have had. I have that as well.
Speaker 2: I I uh later in the episode, I thought it
Speaker 2: would be very clever to call it a tsunami to nightmare.
Speaker 2: But I feel like we're jumping the gun and we'll
Speaker 2: get to it right now. I have that nightmare. I
Speaker 2: also have a similar nightmare about knowing that a nuclear
Speaker 2: explosion has happened and like seeing the wall of like light,
Speaker 2: which would never if you actually were caught near a
Speaker 2: nuclear explosion pretty fast, Yeah, you wouldn't see any movement,
Speaker 2: but that there must be something about that, like the
Speaker 2: tension of seeing your death coming.
Speaker 4: Maybe our therapist should hang out sometime.
Speaker 2: They would uncover so many weird things talking about what
Speaker 2: we are afraid of. But that's what we're here to
Speaker 2: do on this show. So I thought tsunamis were a
Speaker 2: good topic to kick off the summer of year, because
Speaker 2: while tsunamis are not explicitly a summer thing, they can
Speaker 2: happen any time of year. No place gets to me
Speaker 2: thinking about them, like the beach, which is not a
Speaker 2: place ED or I really go. When you guys live
Speaker 2: near a beach, I don't want to dox you.
Speaker 3: We do.
Speaker 4: We both live like within a mile of the beach,
Speaker 4: and we've actually we had a tsunami warning last year,
Speaker 4: did we? Because there was an earthquake, I mean parts
Speaker 4: and member part of Russia Japan got it really bad.
Speaker 4: I didn't know because tsunamis are so random, you really
Speaker 4: don't know until it's hello, you know. So we were
Speaker 4: on a tsunami warning. We did end up just having
Speaker 4: like really really high tide is basically what it resulted in,
Speaker 4: and really bad riptide. So they're like, just don't go
Speaker 4: in the ocean for like three days because it was
Speaker 4: really strong. But yeah, we have. If you walk around
Speaker 4: the area that we live, there are tsunami disaster paths
Speaker 4: like go this way if you hear get away from
Speaker 4: the beach, like this is the way to go? Is
Speaker 4: there heroes?
Speaker 2: Do you guys know is there like a specific.
Speaker 3: Like warning app or warning alarms that you have near
Speaker 3: the beach? Like do you get a heads up?
Speaker 5: Or is it just I feel like I remember something alerting?
Speaker 4: We got to push notification on a phone and it
Speaker 4: basically said.
Speaker 2: Sounds like you took it really seriously.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well no, I.
Speaker 3: I took it too serious.
Speaker 2: Story soon for when.
Speaker 5: Things like that happen, I immediately text Castidy and I'm like,
Speaker 5: am I gonna die? Like what are we gonna do?
Speaker 4: Like what do I have to do?
Speaker 5: Get my car and drive away?
Speaker 4: Like what am I doing?
Speaker 5: And She'll either be like maybe or that's.
Speaker 3: A lot of pressure.
Speaker 2: You're now responsible for two lives.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I just figure, you know, if I'm going to
Speaker 4: go out, she's going out too.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: If I'm not fleeing, she does, she's not allowed to
Speaker 4: flee personally.
Speaker 5: Well, I just need to know if I need to
Speaker 5: like pack up my animals and get the fuck out
Speaker 5: of here because I will.
Speaker 4: Well, no, we got like a push notification through Apple,
Speaker 4: and I think we got a text from the city
Speaker 4: being like, don't go to the beach if you know,
Speaker 4: if you live by the bluff, stay on the bluff.
Speaker 4: There was tons of flooding. There's an area in Long
Speaker 4: Beach that is a peninsula that flooded like crazy, like
Speaker 4: people's homes flooded. You know, the water was in the streets, right,
Speaker 4: But we live up more like on like the bluff area,
Speaker 4: so obviously we're higher ground.
Speaker 3: R Well, the USGS, the US Geological Service, notes that
Speaker 3: you want to hear about my story. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 3: do want to hear about I'll give my.
Speaker 6: You know, this story, the tsunami story where I got
Speaker 6: a fucking alert on the Amazon robot.
Speaker 3: So I was like, what's the.
Speaker 2: I know the story, but the audience doesn't. That's why
Speaker 2: you're talking it to a microphone.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm just saying that, like, uh, that's it. I
Speaker 3: I woke up, I was blurred, like fucking tired. It
Speaker 3: was early in the morning and I got had an alert.
Speaker 6: You know, I can get notifications on the Amazon robot
Speaker 6: and it's like it was like, hey alert, IM like
Speaker 6: I know or anything. What's the alert little machine? And
Speaker 6: it was like tsunami warning in effect for and it.
Speaker 3: Said my zip code. I don't live anywhere near the
Speaker 3: fucking beach.
Speaker 6: And so I was like, what, Like in my brain,
Speaker 6: I was like, this is the I don't live It
Speaker 6: must be the biggest wave in the world. Yeah, because
Speaker 6: that's where my brain went. I'm like, if I'm getting
Speaker 6: a warning right now, that.
Speaker 3: Is that is we awoke in me as I'm like, hey,
Speaker 3: there's a warning.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you're like Santa Monk has already gone.
Speaker 6: So I got in my car and drove east. I
Speaker 6: just got and didn't didn't ask anything else about it.
Speaker 6: I was just like, oh, if they're not on the
Speaker 6: roador ready, they're fucking.
Speaker 4: Idiots, Well thank god you have my phone number now.
Speaker 3: Yeah now.
Speaker 6: But I just got in and I was like, there's
Speaker 6: other things I could do out there anyway. So I
Speaker 6: just drove all the way to like sam Berndino. I
Speaker 6: just went into like the wall out there, did some stuff,
Speaker 6: and then I like.
Speaker 2: Went on figuring what this giant wall of water was
Speaker 2: gonna come fifteen miles in land and you drive home
Speaker 2: later that night.
Speaker 6: I thought, I just didn't want to be here, as
Speaker 6: I I've seen that movie. I didn't want to be here,
Speaker 6: and so I'm like, ah, man, so anyway, that's a
Speaker 6: true story. It's like an embarrassing story. But I I
Speaker 6: found at things to do out there. But I just
Speaker 6: got in the car being like my stupid brain was like,
Speaker 6: if I'm being told about this to your point, like
Speaker 6: it's way there are those.
Speaker 3: Cities are gone.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's no.
Speaker 6: No even why would them given a notification twenty miles inland?
Speaker 6: Yeah unless so I took it very seriously and so
Speaker 6: I for like thirty minutes.
Speaker 3: It was an error, I would imagine. Yeah, I went
Speaker 3: on the internet and it was nobody talking about it.
Speaker 6: I don't know what the situation was, but I followed
Speaker 6: it disorders exactly.
Speaker 2: I had sort of the inverse of a tsunami panic.
Speaker 2: So I don't think I knew what a tsunami was
Speaker 2: until I saw the nineteen ninety eight classic Deep Impact. Yeah,
Speaker 2: which has is most people might know is not a
Speaker 2: tsunami movie. It's an asteroid movie. But the end of
Speaker 2: the movie is really about the tsunami that the asteroid
Speaker 2: causes and it comes into like North Carolina, like it
Speaker 2: comes like way West Virginia or something.
Speaker 6: I mean, I learned I made sure to learn to
Speaker 6: drive a dirt bike because of that movie. Yeah, dirt
Speaker 6: bikes can't take you to higher ground, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you can dip around traffic.
Speaker 5: Yeah, come on, do you have a dirt bike?
Speaker 6: Brothers, I didn't personally own one or anything, but well,
Speaker 6: you're building the time. But I mean, yeah, I'm building
Speaker 6: the moped. But I'm saying like at the time, I
Speaker 6: was young in those I had access to those with family,
Speaker 6: and so I was like, I'm gonna make sure I
Speaker 6: know how to ride this ship.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're like, this is the one thing I need
Speaker 4: for my disaster preparedness kit exactly see dirt bike riding skills.
Speaker 6: And then I got older and it was just never
Speaker 6: a situation where I'd have room for a dirt bike
Speaker 6: or money for one or anything. Also, it's a useless
Speaker 6: skill unless everyone else dies from.
Speaker 3: The wave and I take their dirt bike.
Speaker 2: Well, when I saw that movie, I was also young,
Speaker 2: but I was recovering from an oral surgery and I'm
Speaker 2: drugs and pain meds, and there's shots in that movie
Speaker 2: where like, I don't want to say it was one
Speaker 2: of the first movies, because it probably wasn't, but it's
Speaker 2: one of the first movies. I remember where they put
Speaker 2: cable news in the movie, like with Wolf Blitzer on
Speaker 2: CNN and stuff. And I was like, hi, on pain
Speaker 2: meds for the first time in my life, and very
Speaker 2: confused for a little bit about what was real and
Speaker 2: what wasn't. And then the wave happened and I was
Speaker 2: super scared. And then I basically forgot about tsunamis until
Speaker 2: the earthquake in Japan in twenty eleven, and I was online.
Speaker 2: I was on Facebook in the middle of the night
Speaker 2: or like whatever time it was midnight here, and we
Speaker 2: have a friend who went to college with who was
Speaker 2: living in Japan at the time, and he was posting
Speaker 2: about this giant earthquake and I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 2: that sounds really scary, and there was some videos of it,
Speaker 2: and then I started seeing all these tsunami warnings pop
Speaker 2: up and about how it wasn't just gonna hit Japan,
Speaker 2: that there was a tsunami was gonna hit the west
Speaker 2: coast of America. Keep in mind I was living in
Speaker 2: West Hollywood at the time, but I.
Speaker 3: Might rain went.
Speaker 2: I didn't get a warning, but my brain went to,
Speaker 2: oh my god, I need to get the fuck out
Speaker 2: of here.
Speaker 3: Like, you're even closer to the beach than I was.
Speaker 2: It was still, however, ten miles inland, and probably I
Speaker 2: don't know what the elevation there is, but hundreds, if
Speaker 2: not thousands of feet higher than the than the oat,
Speaker 2: than the beach. And so I was like, do I
Speaker 2: need to pack a bag? Do we need to get
Speaker 2: the fuck out of here?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: And then at some point I became aware. I don't
Speaker 2: know if I was googling or what, but I was like, oh, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: I'm okay. Like I didn't go go far inland.
Speaker 3: I didn't google.
Speaker 4: In question, if you're not in the car, you're a
Speaker 4: man of action, of action?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well last day I did that. I don't I'm
Speaker 3: not a man of action.
Speaker 6: But anything else going to gym buying stuff that I'm
Speaker 6: low with low on.
Speaker 2: But you did the right thing, sort of, because the
Speaker 2: US Geological Service notes that a rule of thumb is
Speaker 2: that if you see the tsunami, it is too late
Speaker 2: to outrun it, oh no, or as an article we
Speaker 2: were going to touch on at the end of the
Speaker 2: episode puts it quote among natural disasters, tsunamis maybe the
Speaker 2: closest to being completely unsurvivable.
Speaker 3: The only likely way to outlive.
Speaker 2: One is to not be there when it happens. So
Speaker 2: they are extremely dangerous, and I guess it's good to
Speaker 2: know that all four of us to some degree have
Speaker 2: either had an experience with one or are sufficiently afraid
Speaker 2: of them.
Speaker 3: Well, what's that movie with Natalie Nailmi Watts.
Speaker 6: It's a tsunami movie and it's some of the most
Speaker 6: graphic fucked up.
Speaker 2: Based on the two thousand and four Is that impossible?
Speaker 3: The impossible or something like that.
Speaker 4: I always just think of Day After Tomorrow.
Speaker 6: I haven't seen all of it, but I had seen
Speaker 6: like the one clip that not even on YouTube, it
Speaker 6: was like on cable or something, and it was like, Oh,
Speaker 6: that's the most horrific, graphic fucked up thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 6: Yeah at that moment, Yeah, and I was just that
Speaker 6: was in my brain when the warning came in, where
Speaker 6: I was like every element of the little bit of
Speaker 6: that movie I saw, like the post tsunami issue I
Speaker 6: was like, I want to be nowhere fucking near this.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, because the tsunami self is destructive, the aftermath
Speaker 2: is also horrible.
Speaker 6: Also, the idea that, like, because it would happen the
Speaker 6: mid of the night or late Yeah, the idea.
Speaker 3: That you're asleep and all of a sudden, now you're underwater. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 6: If it's if it's sneaky like that, like could it
Speaker 6: you just be asleep and now you're underwater.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know, but sleep and then you'd be dead.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure. There's depending on where you are in
Speaker 3: a moment you go, oh no water underwater. But that
Speaker 3: freaks me out.
Speaker 5: Man, Okay, well can I ask the question?
Speaker 3: Yes, so on this show.
Speaker 5: Doing it anyway. So the tsunami, big, big, big, big
Speaker 5: wave like I'm assuming hundreds.
Speaker 2: Feet high can be can be?
Speaker 5: Depend and then it goes out from the ocean, yeah,
Speaker 5: covers a bunch of houses land, and then just smacks down.
Speaker 2: So it doesn't We're going to get to the physics
Speaker 2: of a tsunami in a minute. It doesn't really smack down.
Speaker 4: Because oh, it doesn't curl.
Speaker 2: So the etymology, the etymology of the word tsunami is actually,
Speaker 2: I think one of the most basic things about these
Speaker 2: natural disasters. It comes from the Japanese soup meaning harbor
Speaker 2: and nami meaning wave, harbor wave, because that's where the
Speaker 2: damage was always the worst. Out at sea. We'll get
Speaker 2: to this in a bit too, But out at see,
Speaker 2: you don't even notice the tsunami. They're not big giant
Speaker 2: curling waves. They pass under your boat like regular water.
Speaker 2: So ancient Japanese fishermen out at sea wouldn't even have
Speaker 2: any an idea that anything was wrong.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry for real, Yeah, they wouldn't have. So when
Speaker 3: do you know something? How close to the land is
Speaker 3: a guy to get before you see like a wall
Speaker 3: of water. We're getting to that.
Speaker 5: Confuses That's why I was like.
Speaker 3: Waves, so I could be like on the water. And
Speaker 3: then that's why.
Speaker 2: Well, by the time so the fishermen would come back
Speaker 2: and they wouldn't even a they wouldn't know that anything
Speaker 2: was wrong. And by the time they got back to shore,
Speaker 2: the waves have already receded, so they weren't in any danger.
Speaker 2: They just found a wrecked town basically where a town
Speaker 2: had once stood. So the Japanese got hit by the
Speaker 2: tsunamis a lot, and they knew a lot about them,
Speaker 2: and that'll come back into a story for us a.
Speaker 3: Little bit later.
Speaker 2: But before we get to that, and before we get
Speaker 2: to the physics of it, I do think we should
Speaker 2: mention that, yes, there are two modern, very famous, very
Speaker 2: terrible tragedies that people are aware of that involves tsunamis Fukushima.
Speaker 2: Fukushima was a tsunami. That it was the tsunami that
Speaker 2: I was afraid of in California actually causing problems in Japan.
Speaker 2: That earthquake was a nine point one magnitude earthquake, one
Speaker 2: of the largest earthquakes ever recorded, and it took about
Speaker 2: an hour for the wave that it created to smash inland.
Speaker 2: And it would have been bad enough if the ninety
Speaker 2: eight foot tall wave had only killed the eighteen to
Speaker 2: twenty thousand people caught in its path, but it caused
Speaker 2: a second disaster, which was crashing over the sea walls
Speaker 2: that had been built around the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant,
Speaker 2: where it round the backup generators in the basement of
Speaker 2: the of the power plant and caused three reactor cores
Speaker 2: to melt down within seventy two hours, creating a nuclear
Speaker 2: disaster that will contaminate the entire area for the next
Speaker 2: forty to fifty years.
Speaker 4: I remember after this happened. I at the time was vegetarian, pescatarian,
Speaker 4: and so I was eating a lot of fish, and
Speaker 4: I remember everyone was like, stop eating fish right now.
Speaker 2: Because the radiation that leaked into the water.
Speaker 6: No one's talking about that, considering he said forty to
Speaker 6: fifty years. I remember about that that month, But now
Speaker 6: I feel like we're a couple of years out now.
Speaker 3: No one's talking about three eyed sushi.
Speaker 2: I don't know how far. I don't know how far
Speaker 2: that radioactive water spreads around the disaster area water. I'm
Speaker 2: sure no one's fishing in that area right now.
Speaker 6: I don't think some of those fish got out, probably
Speaker 6: effecting the other fish like zombies.
Speaker 2: Well they're not fish biting other fish and turning them
Speaker 2: into fukushini.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we don't spend enough time down there.
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess anything could be happening. I do
Speaker 2: think radioactive water probably could seep out in all directions,
Speaker 2: But you're talking about such massive amounts of water that
Speaker 2: I'm not sure. I'm sure somebody has studied the radius
Speaker 2: of which you can be outside of and say this
Speaker 2: is safe.
Speaker 6: A number of times I've thought I'm sure someone studied,
Speaker 6: and then in an episode of our show I find
Speaker 6: out they fucking didn't.
Speaker 4: Like you were like, I don't know, We'll just see
Speaker 4: what happens.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was really no one knew, just no one new. Well,
Speaker 3: as a quick aside, if you want to know howtimes
Speaker 3: fish kish other fish kish at your feet, I don't know.
Speaker 3: This is a problems. We all been fish fish kiss
Speaker 3: other fish sometimes fish fish in terms of radioactive and
Speaker 3: you don't even know.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, that would make an amazing flaming lip song.
Speaker 2: Well, as a quick aside, I was gonna say, if
Speaker 2: you want to see how the Japanese or some of
Speaker 2: the Japanese feel about the way that their government handled
Speaker 2: the Fukushima nuclear disaster, you should see a Godzilla movie
Speaker 2: called sen Godzilla that came out I think in like
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen. It is not only a great take on
Speaker 2: the Godzilla design, but it is a really funny satire
Speaker 2: about the Japanese government's inability to handle a crisis. And
Speaker 2: while I think some of it's probably lost on me
Speaker 2: not being Japanese, it is pretty obvious even to an
Speaker 2: American viewer. It's sort of like if Armando Iannucci, who
Speaker 2: did Veep, decide to make a Godzilla movie. It's super funny,
Speaker 2: it's pretty scary, and the Godzilla is great, and I
Speaker 2: think it gives you a sense of maybe how people
Speaker 2: felt about how trustworthy the government was after that event.
Speaker 3: So I'm sure there.
Speaker 2: Have been some things that have maybe been whitewashed, the
Speaker 2: little or you know, we've been told don't be afraid,
Speaker 2: and maybe we should be afraid.
Speaker 3: The fish, the fish. Yeah, I'm agreeing with you. Oh
Speaker 3: my god, dud. The wonderfish is the only thing that
Speaker 3: hasn't gone up in price because.
Speaker 6: Because they're fishing, because they know I'm gonna cut the
Speaker 6: sih img out. I don't want to sound like a
Speaker 6: nonsense person.
Speaker 2: As ed noted years prior to this, disapur in two
Speaker 2: thousand and four and even more devastating tsunami hit Indonesia,
Speaker 2: which was also came in the wake of the third
Speaker 2: largest earthquake ever recorded, tied in a nine point one
Speaker 2: on the Richter scale. The fault the earthquake fault ruptured
Speaker 2: along about seven hundred and fifty miles of seabed, which
Speaker 2: is the longest fault rupture in human history. It shook
Speaker 2: for about ten minutes, which is crazy because most earthquakes
Speaker 2: only shake for thirty to sixty seconds.
Speaker 3: Maybe.
Speaker 4: Yeah, even sixty seconds is like feels like forever. So
Speaker 4: I can't even imagine ten minutes.
Speaker 5: I would lose my mind.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like, actually, if you felt an earthquake that strong.
Speaker 5: For ten minutes, yeah, yeah, yeah, it should be walking towards.
Speaker 7: This, you would lose.
Speaker 6: Yeah, at a certain point, you'd be like nine minutes.
Speaker 6: Any like, it's never gonna end then, yea, this is.
Speaker 3: Never gonna end. This is life. There was life before
Speaker 3: the shake, and now we just live in shake. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Or the world's gonna split in fully in half. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this group has been split in half by your hand
Speaker 3: the entire time.
Speaker 2: According to Sky and Telescope maggaz quote, the Sumatra earthquake
Speaker 2: released as much energy as four hundred and seventy five
Speaker 2: mega tons of TNT, or about twenty three thousand times
Speaker 2: the energy released by the atomic bomb dropped on Heroshiam.
Speaker 3: It shifted.
Speaker 2: It was such a powerful earthquake that it shifted the
Speaker 2: planet's axis by about a centimeter, and scientists recorded evidence
Speaker 2: that the entire planet vibrated up to about ten millimeters
Speaker 2: during the quake.
Speaker 4: See that makes me. That makes me sick. Yeah, everything else,
Speaker 4: I'm like, I can conceptualize that, but the idea of oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: I forget that we're in space and we are our
Speaker 4: own small object really just upset me right now.
Speaker 3: Didn't trying to build a big dam or something. And
Speaker 3: it also functions it up. I don't know what you're talking.
Speaker 3: I'll do we get into it.
Speaker 6: The show notes and there's like man made stuff very
Speaker 6: recently that's just too big. And it also like adjusted
Speaker 6: the axis or something like that.
Speaker 2: But the idea, I think, I think to Cassidy's point,
Speaker 2: the idea that the entire globe vibrated, you know, in
Speaker 2: multiple directions, even millimeters, does make you think, like, I
Speaker 2: don't even understand the physics of how that would have happened.
Speaker 2: The Earth is suspended in space gravitational poll by the Sun,
Speaker 2: and this quake was strong enough to break that poll.
Speaker 4: Well, we're not technically suspended in space. We're flying through space.
Speaker 2: Well sure, right, right right, So trying to imagine our
Speaker 2: planet rotating, I was just up at at Griffith Park
Speaker 2: Observatory the other day and they had a little model
Speaker 2: of the seasons and they have the Earth rotating around
Speaker 2: the Sun and it makes the full It goes the
Speaker 2: whole way around the Sun in you know, two minutes
Speaker 2: or whatever, and they have the Earth spinning at the
Speaker 2: speed that like a day would be when you fast
Speaker 2: forward it that fast. And it was like, I mean,
Speaker 2: the Earth is not spinning that fast, but to see
Speaker 2: it illustrated that way was crazy to see how many
Speaker 2: times the Earth spins basically in a whole year, just
Speaker 2: keeps fucking going.
Speaker 4: And then to think about it, it's like three hundred
Speaker 4: and sixty five times it is.
Speaker 6: I do you guys remember Okay Cupid and they might
Speaker 6: still be a yeah. So pre like the apps and stuff,
Speaker 6: there was a lot more desktop dating or whatever, and.
Speaker 3: I remember I'd signed up for it.
Speaker 6: I've never even used it, but I signed up for it,
Speaker 6: and I was had a very long elaborate uh like
Speaker 6: like like you have to check off Like it was
Speaker 6: like a whole test of like here's a question and
Speaker 6: then it's yes or no question, and then the third
Speaker 6: thing is how important is it to you.
Speaker 3: The person that you're gonna be matching with got this
Speaker 3: right or wrong? And it was like, oh, do you
Speaker 3: think skunks are pretty or whatever? And it was like
Speaker 3: yes or do?
Speaker 6: It was like, but I do, I guess. But if
Speaker 6: the person who wants to date said no, I don't care.
Speaker 6: One of the questions and I think about it all
Speaker 6: the time.
Speaker 3: One of the questions was does the Earth revolve around
Speaker 3: the sun? Or does I'm sorry, does the sun revolve
Speaker 3: around the earth? And it was like yes or no?
Speaker 3: And then how important is it to you that the
Speaker 3: other person got it right?
Speaker 6: Yeah, that was the only one where I was I
Speaker 6: got a very strong opinion on that I need them
Speaker 6: to know this.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I went back to like, you know, pre like ancient.
Speaker 2: Rome my partner to be a heliocentric Julio centrist.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but I think that was actually a pretty good
Speaker 6: system maybe of like how to do the matching or whatever.
Speaker 2: Do you care if your match is an idiot and
Speaker 2: then they can just put everything. I might say no
Speaker 2: to that, Oh that's true.
Speaker 3: I might not care. But if they don't know this
Speaker 3: one fact, that's a game trape.
Speaker 4: That's my problem is I'd be like, yes, it's very
Speaker 4: important to me that you know this, but then I
Speaker 4: would end up with a know it all like myself,
Speaker 4: and I'd fucking hate them.
Speaker 7: Oh you would.
Speaker 3: I don't think knowing that would make you not that one.
Speaker 4: I mean like every single Oh.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, yes they should.
Speaker 2: They should follow up your firm, yes with how hot
Speaker 2: does the person need to beat in the gate?
Speaker 4: This change above?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Anyway, The tsunami that followed this massive earthquake killed two
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty seven thousand people across fourteen countries a
Speaker 2: long in the ocean, yes, the wild. Unlike Japan, who's
Speaker 2: been prepared forever, the the countries along this Indian Ocean
Speaker 2: area had no tsunami warning system whatsoever. The Pacific Tsunami
Speaker 2: Warnings had to detected the quake, but it had no
Speaker 2: protocol or contact list for anyone in.
Speaker 3: That part of the world.
Speaker 2: So by the time they gathered all the affected governments
Speaker 2: literally phone numbers to call them and say, hey, you've
Speaker 2: got a problem, it was already over that. The wave
Speaker 2: had raced ashore.
Speaker 5: So you literally cannot survive.
Speaker 3: It's very, very difficult.
Speaker 4: Some people did. I remember watching documentaries of life, but
Speaker 4: it's like three people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's sheer. If you were right where it hits.
Speaker 2: When it hits, you're probably gonna die. And there's a
Speaker 2: couple of reasons.
Speaker 6: I think The Impossible is based on a real family. Yes,
Speaker 6: and even what was I part of that is true.
Speaker 3: I'm like, this family is unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Well, that's I think the title of the movie references
Speaker 2: both the strength of the wave and the luck of
Speaker 2: the family that survive.
Speaker 6: It also represents that getting me to watch any more
Speaker 6: than I watched would be impossible.
Speaker 5: I will never watch that movie. It is I'm so
Speaker 5: afraid of the like this topic in particular, like is
Speaker 5: gonna give me nightmares?
Speaker 3: Good good, good good.
Speaker 4: Welcome, then your therapists can talk to me.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm gonna be like scared all the time. Here's
Speaker 5: their contact.
Speaker 2: Yes, we we probably we should get a like workers
Speaker 2: comp insurance because as we have more people guests on
Speaker 2: the show and we give them horrific nightmares. Yea, yeah,
Speaker 2: we're gonna need a lawyer to help handle those cases.
Speaker 3: Ship man lawyer. But we don't have any money. Look
Speaker 3: where we're sitting.
Speaker 2: So one of the reasons that people for so long
Speaker 2: have thought of tsunamis as giant curling waves is because
Speaker 2: this very famous work of Japanese art called the Great
Speaker 2: Wave off Kanagawa famous. Yeah you sent me, Ed sent
Speaker 2: me an.
Speaker 3: Emoji of this artwork as I was prepping this episode
Speaker 3: already in the phone. That's how famous it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah it is people. Some art historians believe that it
Speaker 2: is the most reproduced art work of art in the world,
Speaker 2: even more so than the Mona Lisa. And it has
Speaker 2: completely fucked up people's thoughts of what a tidal wave
Speaker 2: is or what a tsunami is, because what the painting depicts,
Speaker 2: this famous blue curl, if you're going over a pretty
Speaker 2: small boat, going over a pretty small boat is actually
Speaker 2: a rogue wave, Amanda, As you mentioned earlier, rogue waves
Speaker 2: or Cassidy even.
Speaker 4: Very interested in, So rogue waves are.
Speaker 2: Very very different than tsunamis. Besides their shape and form
Speaker 2: is where the energy in the wave is stored. So
Speaker 2: a wind wave, the energy is all stored on the
Speaker 2: surface of the wave, which causes that curl and when
Speaker 2: they hit the shore they crash. And that is also
Speaker 2: why a wind wave you can if you're standing if
Speaker 2: you've ever been standing on the shore of a beach
Speaker 2: and you see the wave coming. People will say, well,
Speaker 2: dive under the wave if you don't want to get hit.
Speaker 2: If you dive under a wind wave, the energy dissipates
Speaker 2: the further down the wave you go, so but when
Speaker 2: you dive under the of it, you won't even feel
Speaker 2: it going over.
Speaker 3: Your surfers go down when they're yes blue crush.
Speaker 2: Here is where we get into the physics of the tsunami,
Speaker 2: how the wall is formed, all those important questions. A
Speaker 2: tsunami is the opposite of a wind wave in terms
Speaker 2: of its energy distribution. The tsunami is the entire water
Speaker 2: column moving from the seafloor to the surface of the ocean.
Speaker 2: It's not a wave on top of the ocean. It's
Speaker 2: the entire ocean getting pushed sideways. And that is why
Speaker 2: ships at sea don't notice them passing beneath, because there
Speaker 2: is no energy atop the curl. It is just the
Speaker 2: entire water table being pushed.
Speaker 3: And we wouldn't even bump up a little bit.
Speaker 2: Sometimes on the open ocean, a tsunami can be three
Speaker 2: or four feet tall, so you'll notice a little bit
Speaker 2: of a rise, but nothing that you would think is
Speaker 2: going to be a problem at any.
Speaker 5: Point so that's the tsunami, like gearing up.
Speaker 6: Yes, I guess it's a tsunami in the sense that
Speaker 6: it's like if someone was standing behind you trying to
Speaker 6: push you forward.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of like, oh, what the fuck? What
Speaker 3: the fuck? Everyone leave me be Like it feels like
Speaker 3: it's physically the ocean's being pushed. Yes, I think so,
Speaker 3: I think I was pushing. Its just an earthquake, but
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, the easiest way to get nothing better
Speaker 3: to do.
Speaker 2: I think the easiest way to imagine this, even though
Speaker 2: they are not as common, are our tsunamis caused by
Speaker 2: landslides because it's the easiest way to imagine the water displacement.
Speaker 2: So you have this giant landslide, right, all of that
Speaker 2: earth slams into the water and suddenly all that water
Speaker 2: is displaced and has to go somewhere. In this case,
Speaker 2: you know, if the landslide is moving forward, that water
Speaker 2: is being pushed forward. So all of that water is
Speaker 2: being pushed forward. And in deep water it might be
Speaker 2: you know, just a couple of feet tall, but it
Speaker 2: can be two hundred kilometers long front to back, moving
Speaker 2: at the speed of a jet basically sometimes up to
Speaker 2: four hundred and forty miles an hour across the entire ocean.
Speaker 3: Is I can't. I know we were talking about fish earlier,
Speaker 3: but what a fucking day like.
Speaker 6: You must be racked down there, because on the surface
Speaker 6: it's fine, yes, but like the whole it's like.
Speaker 3: If all of a sudden the air became heavy and
Speaker 3: pushed it. Yes, there must be.
Speaker 6: Fish doing fucking carwheels down there, flipping and zipping and
Speaker 6: going crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Do I even want to know this, but I'm gonna
Speaker 7: ask it anyway.
Speaker 5: Yeah, all the creatures in the ocean, they land, they
Speaker 5: must be get thrown out they land somewhere else.
Speaker 3: No, the creatures in the ocean find a squid on
Speaker 3: top of a mountain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the creatures in the ocean sometimes get it pretty bad.
Speaker 2: I'm sure the I don't know that there is a
Speaker 2: one all the time answer to that. I'm sure the
Speaker 2: science of the particular wave determines how bad the creatures
Speaker 2: get it. But there are many creatures that can be
Speaker 2: brought to shore by the wave hauling ass across the
Speaker 2: entire ocean.
Speaker 4: That was one of the things that happened in two
Speaker 4: thousand and four, where when these places were getting flooded.
Speaker 4: The animals were also getting flooded, and also all of
Speaker 4: the land animals were seeking refuge, and so there were
Speaker 4: like stories about people who were had climbed into like
Speaker 4: tall palm trees, and there were scorpions and snakes and
Speaker 4: stuff that also had gotten into these palm trees, also
Speaker 4: seeking refuge and were obviously very riled up and biting
Speaker 4: and attacking. Whoa, yeah, so that's there's so many things
Speaker 4: that you don't think about the outside of just oh,
Speaker 4: drowning or getting hit by.
Speaker 3: This way, we need to figure out how to communicate
Speaker 3: with animals.
Speaker 5: I was gonna say, they didn't become friends, like, huh, it's.
Speaker 3: Cool, we're all up here, not slapping and biting.
Speaker 4: Just a truth for a minute. We'll get back to
Speaker 4: whatever we're up to when this is done. But no,
Speaker 4: that was one of the stories I remember reading about
Speaker 4: this this person who survived a tsunami and they were
Speaker 4: holding on to the top of a palm tree because
Speaker 4: the water had hit Yeah.
Speaker 3: Crazy palm tre is a good one because it's.
Speaker 4: Got like flex Yeah, and that's probably one of the
Speaker 4: reasons that you know, but that there were scorpions and
Speaker 4: snakes in the palm tree with him and biting him
Speaker 4: and attacking him. He was, but he was like, if
Speaker 4: I let go, the water was so strong, If I
Speaker 4: let go them dead.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's that's a that's a tough person. I don't
Speaker 3: know that I would have. I would say like, oh,
Speaker 3: no scorpions and just let go take me.
Speaker 5: Same to take me away. I mean, I wouldn't even
Speaker 5: have the upper body strength to go together in the place.
Speaker 7: I don't know how.
Speaker 3: This is the person who was already doing that anyway,
Speaker 3: just climbing.
Speaker 2: Every time he got bit by a scorpion, he just
Speaker 2: flexed and kissed his bicep again and remind himself how
Speaker 2: incredibly strong he was.
Speaker 6: No, stay up here, I would My last thought would be,
Speaker 6: I bet it would be safe up there if I
Speaker 6: had the strength to get to.
Speaker 3: Oh, and then the wave comes.
Speaker 2: Well, there are two reasons that these waves, the tsunamis,
Speaker 2: are incredibly dangerous when they make land. And the first
Speaker 2: is called shoaling, which is why they become these walls
Speaker 2: of water. And I'd never heard about shoaling before, but
Speaker 2: it's a pretty fascinating process to picture. So what happens
Speaker 2: is you have all this water racing along and then
Speaker 2: as it hits the shallow water near the coast, the
Speaker 2: front of this giant wave creates friction with the seafloor
Speaker 2: and starts to slow down, but the back of the
Speaker 2: wave doesn't slow down because the back of the wave
Speaker 2: is still moving at the same speed. And that's how
Speaker 2: you get that compression where the back of the wave
Speaker 2: catches up to the front of the wave, and that
Speaker 2: creates that building wall of water as it all just
Speaker 2: builds up against the water, pumping the brakes at the front,
Speaker 2: and so that creates that wall of water effect and
Speaker 2: turns it into this giant, roaring churn, and that shoaling
Speaker 2: effect can turn a three foot wave into a thirty
Speaker 2: foot wave, into a sixty foot wave, into one hundred
Speaker 2: foot wave even bigger. The other reasons un I mean
Speaker 2: waves are very dangerous is once they hit the shore,
Speaker 2: they don't stop. That energy that a regular wave expends
Speaker 2: when it crashes is because there's no crash, No, it's
Speaker 2: just moving straight forward and that wall of seawater just
Speaker 2: keeps coming. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warns people
Speaker 2: with regards to tsunamis that just six inches of a
Speaker 2: tsunami can knock a full grown adult down, and twelve
Speaker 2: inches can carry away a car.
Speaker 6: Now, this much I know to be true because the
Speaker 6: typhoon Lagoon at Disney, which is maybe a canceled term,
Speaker 6: I don't know, but it is.
Speaker 3: I was on the shore, the little tiny shore, with
Speaker 3: my little six year old legs in the water.
Speaker 6: So the typhoon legoon, if people don't know, it's like
Speaker 6: a man generated wave that comes to big wave. It's
Speaker 6: like a water park and then I don't know if
Speaker 6: people enjoy it. But I was a little six year
Speaker 6: old and I just head up to my little six
Speaker 6: year old knees in the water, and it doesn't become
Speaker 6: soft ground until like a couple feet in, so it's
Speaker 6: still like like sidewalk ass concrete until you get to
Speaker 6: the soft parts. But the littlest amount of wave that
Speaker 6: was at that point it had dissipated so much, but
Speaker 6: for a little six year old spinlely legs, it wasn't
Speaker 6: enough and I got immediately swept down and knocked over
Speaker 6: and like dragged all the way across that It was
Speaker 6: blood in the water.
Speaker 3: It was crazy.
Speaker 6: I had to go to a first aid hut or
Speaker 6: whatever the theme was.
Speaker 2: I'm glad there weren't any sharks in the still with
Speaker 2: noon sharks.
Speaker 4: For that as well, say where with the alligators we
Speaker 4: were in Florida.
Speaker 3: It was Florida. There was no alligators.
Speaker 6: And but I'm just saying that, like I it was
Speaker 6: such a small amount of water that knocked me over
Speaker 6: and dragged me multiple multiple feet, right.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of force in that fast moving water.
Speaker 2: So that's why even just six inches or twelve inches
Speaker 2: can take a car, because you're talking about water that's
Speaker 2: been going hundreds of miles an hour for hundreds of miles,
Speaker 2: and so when it impacts something, that impact is basically
Speaker 2: like being hit with a car, just with water, So
Speaker 2: you're not feeling the full force of it when it's
Speaker 2: just a little bit, but it's enough to sweep your
Speaker 2: legs out from under you. That's on top of the
Speaker 2: fact that that water that is racing towards you, whether
Speaker 2: it's six inches or twelve inches or twenty feet or
Speaker 2: forty feet high, is filled with everything that it's already hit.
Speaker 2: In many cases, that water has already churned up boats
Speaker 2: and cars and animals, and so it is a wave
Speaker 2: of a wall of water moving hundreds of miles an hour,
Speaker 2: filled with glass and wood.
Speaker 3: This is mud battle.
Speaker 6: To ever play mud bombs as a kid, No, you
Speaker 6: would like take like dirt bombs, and like you would
Speaker 6: you would have like snowball fights.
Speaker 3: So with dirt No, well where they filled with glass too.
Speaker 6: But the thing is there'd always be like pebbles and
Speaker 6: rocks and weird ship that was in there that that
Speaker 6: the kid wasn't checking, you know what I mean?
Speaker 4: Mud bombs so confidently like that was gonna be.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was like, no, I just had snowballs.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we had sometimes we needed that. That lifestyle have
Speaker 6: survived beyond.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, but I guess what it worked too. It
Speaker 3: made me seem less insane.
Speaker 6: But yeah, sometimes it'd be like rocks and stuff and
Speaker 6: that as the person didn't check before they threw it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's basically a PSEUDONYMI you got it then, yeah,
Speaker 2: and everyone hears.
Speaker 4: You're microdosing tsunami.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So yeah, if you are hit by all of that
Speaker 2: debris and and all of that force, it's really bad news.
Speaker 2: When you're in the middle of it, there's really no
Speaker 2: way to survive it. Oh my god, And one final
Speaker 2: detail I think worth knowing about physics of tsunamis is
Speaker 2: that sometimes, as seen in two thousand and four, the
Speaker 2: sea pulls all the way back right before it happens.
Speaker 2: It kind of looks like the low tide comes in
Speaker 2: in just a couple of minutes, like way back, and.
Speaker 6: It also looks like menacing, like it's charging up to yeah,
Speaker 6: like drawing back a boat or shoot it at you
Speaker 6: or something.
Speaker 2: Basically when it happened in two thousand and four, though
Speaker 2: some of the video that survives you can see tourists
Speaker 2: like kind of being like, huh what They're like running out,
Speaker 2: Oh that's.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: They're like they don't they have no idea what's happening.
Speaker 4: It is so ominous. It's like some of the most
Speaker 4: jarring for like not being actually explicit to watch right,
Speaker 4: you know. Yeah, it is some of the most disturbing
Speaker 4: footage that I've ever seen.
Speaker 3: In my life. How do we still have that? Whatever
Speaker 3: camera or phone survived, I'd.
Speaker 4: Be like it was like CCTV stuff, so that was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 4: there's like resorts and stuff on the sea.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, that would have been like that's my commercial forever.
Speaker 6: It's in portste But I'd be like Saiko the watch
Speaker 6: that survives a tsunami.
Speaker 3: That type of thing would be like we built.
Speaker 2: The whole thing out of the black box exactly. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it it pulls all the way back. And that's so
Speaker 2: this I had more trouble picturing. But the reason that
Speaker 2: the sea draws back is because if the initial displacement
Speaker 2: of the water drives the seafloor down. So I was saying,
Speaker 2: imagine the landslide version right where all the land rushes
Speaker 2: in and pushes all the water forward. If an earthquake
Speaker 2: happens when one when one of the Earth's plates slips
Speaker 2: over the other, it pushes the other, pushes one plate down,
Speaker 2: it creates a trow at the front of the wave,
Speaker 2: which I can't quite picture, but New Zealand's g. O.
Speaker 2: Neet tells us that quote. Sometimes the trow reaches the
Speaker 2: coast first, and so when the trough reaches first, the
Speaker 2: ocean draws down and sucks water are away from the coastlines,
Speaker 2: and then it rushes back in with enormous speed when
Speaker 2: the wave arrives. So it's not actually building up, okay,
Speaker 2: but it.
Speaker 3: Appears that way.
Speaker 6: I do like to imagine that the snow the water
Speaker 6: at the shoreline was like who's coming, what's coming? No,
Speaker 6: we're gonna go. Yeah, and then couldn't get out fast enough,
Speaker 6: just like us, ends up getting sucked into it, the
Speaker 6: water itself, the water itself in this style.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, this water is like we're not deep sea water.
Speaker 4: We want We're hanging out with like snorkelers. We're chilling.
Speaker 3: People love us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're happy to see us. They want to They're
Speaker 4: excited to pop their little tosies in the sand. Yeah
Speaker 4: and get a little taste.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is cute Pixars waves. I can see the
Speaker 2: trailer now. Yea being bullied by the big bad tsunami.
Speaker 3: Tsunamis like help us hurt everything, Amanda gets it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that would make me cry.
Speaker 3: Well, that's what Pricksar movies are supposed to do.
Speaker 5: You remember the volcano.
Speaker 3: One about a volcano like cars with a.
Speaker 5: Volcano, this volcano and he's like singing about how the
Speaker 5: water is rising above him and his his love.
Speaker 4: Is like out. Yes, they played it before, Malana. I
Speaker 4: think that I did not know how to play it
Speaker 4: under the water and then.
Speaker 5: And then the water comes up and then he gets
Speaker 5: back up and then he's with his love so beautiful.
Speaker 4: I know how to play that whole song on the ukuleles.
Speaker 5: Can you please sing it for me?
Speaker 4: Pop it out? I'm just kidding.
Speaker 5: I will cry when.
Speaker 7: I hear that song.
Speaker 3: Think our shorts are so good. I never pick up
Speaker 3: on them. Like the one with the little bird on
Speaker 3: the beach is so good.
Speaker 4: Oh I like that one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Sandpiper on sand Piper presto. There used to be
Speaker 3: a big deal. You'd watch Bernie before Wally.
Speaker 5: Yeah, cute that that particular volcano one is It's real good.
Speaker 4: The real tsunami is less cute, right right, Yeah.
Speaker 5: There's no like little cute eyes on the tsunami.
Speaker 4: I guess I like think about like when I think
Speaker 4: about like water displacement in particular, Like you think about
Speaker 4: those videos that are like slow motion when they drop
Speaker 4: like bowling ball into a bucket, Yes, and you see
Speaker 4: the water well up before it goes out, right, Like
Speaker 4: That's what I'm picturing kind of. There's like this inciting
Speaker 4: incident and it wells up around the where the incident
Speaker 4: happened and then falls back out right.
Speaker 2: It's really I try to sometimes get into more like
Speaker 2: granular detail about these things on this show, But it
Speaker 2: was wild to me as soon as I scratch just
Speaker 2: a little bit below the surface, the like water physics
Speaker 2: that you that even Wikipedia is trying to describe, like
Speaker 2: the way that the wave motion and this thing hits.
Speaker 2: I was like, this is I'm so far out of
Speaker 2: my depth even trying to describe this math toew you think,
Speaker 2: I mean, waves are something we see all the time,
Speaker 2: but it certainly seems like the physics behind all that
Speaker 2: is very, very hard and complicated.
Speaker 4: So my problem with physics is I'm like, I'll be
Speaker 4: like reading it and I'll be like, I understand what
Speaker 4: this is saying, and then but I'm so I'm smart
Speaker 4: enough to read it, but I'm not smart enough to
Speaker 4: make it, like to regurgitate it in any sort of
Speaker 4: meaningful way.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Well, that hasn't stopped anyone who likes the idea of
Speaker 2: string theory from you know, being like, you.
Speaker 3: Know, it's like quantum physics, is it?
Speaker 2: Because I don't think anybody writing these books understands a
Speaker 2: single fucking thing.
Speaker 4: Aren't you also six beers deep?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we've found evidence, and by we I mean scientists
Speaker 2: that tsunamis have been wrecking havoc on human civilization for centuries,
Speaker 2: mostly due to the fact that we humans have been
Speaker 2: placing ourselves in their cross hairs since the beginning of time.
Speaker 2: But that is what happens when your prehistory is filled
Speaker 2: with fishing cultures that spring up around coasts, inlets, bays,
Speaker 2: and places where tsunamis generally end up being.
Speaker 3: A really big problem.
Speaker 2: The earliest tsunami we have decent evidence for may have
Speaker 2: actually helped destroy one of the most sophisticated civilizations of
Speaker 2: the ancient world, the Minoans, who lived on Crete about
Speaker 2: seventy miles south of the island.
Speaker 3: It's an island, is an island Greece, Greece, unclear, he'll
Speaker 3: tell you.
Speaker 2: And Crete was about seventy miles south of a small
Speaker 2: Greek island called Thera, which we all know by its
Speaker 2: modern name Santorini.
Speaker 3: But the blue and.
Speaker 2: White instagram bait that we see at every Honeymoon photo
Speaker 2: for the past twenty years is not what Santorini originally
Speaker 2: looked like. Those cliffs and the bay are what's left
Speaker 2: after one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history,
Speaker 2: literally blew the top off the island and dropped it
Speaker 2: into the sea. The date of the explosion is contested.
Speaker 2: Modern dating places at around sixteen twenty seven to sixteen
Speaker 2: hundred BC. Other archaeologists using Egyptian historical records place it
Speaker 2: somewhere around fifteen thirty to fifteen hundred BC. But whatever
Speaker 2: the case was, it was classified now as a VEI
Speaker 2: seven or volcanic explosivity Index seven, which is a little
Speaker 2: bit less than what Ed will rate at if anything
Speaker 2: goes wrong with the table that he's concerned about.
Speaker 6: I don't know what happened, but the reason I've been
Speaker 6: looking down is for some reason, my camera and just
Speaker 6: my camera became insanely blown out and I'm just like
Speaker 6: a white ghost with like dark eyes. So I've been
Speaker 6: trying to fix it in real time.
Speaker 4: But this is this is why we brought you here today.
Speaker 4: There was a tsunami. You didn't drive fast enough.
Speaker 3: He's the ghost.
Speaker 4: This is your sixth sense moment.
Speaker 2: And I'm sorry.
Speaker 6: Why would God make a ghost who always wants to
Speaker 6: kill themselves?
Speaker 3: Is that like a way to.
Speaker 4: He's you know, he's a lot of irony.
Speaker 3: This is no good.
Speaker 6: Well anyway, I'm I'm I'm from the movie Powder Now.
Speaker 5: But it makes you feel better to try to fix it.
Speaker 3: Give me two seconds.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I know, I know what.
Speaker 2: The ve I seven is the second highest classification on
Speaker 2: the scale, second only to ve I, and scientists think
Speaker 2: that this explosion expelled four times as much rock and
Speaker 2: ash as Krakatoa. The ash fell across hundreds of miles,
Speaker 2: and then the now empty center of the island collapsed
Speaker 2: into the empty magma chamber of the volcano, and the
Speaker 2: sea poured in to fill the hole, which created an
Speaker 2: even bigger eruption because when cold seawater hits an open
Speaker 2: volcanic vent, you get a giant explosion of all of
Speaker 2: that water instantaneously turning to steam. And then when the
Speaker 2: chunk of the island the size of a small country,
Speaker 2: fell back into the ocean, you got a tsunami. Now,
Speaker 2: remember that explosion happened on the island of Thera. The
Speaker 2: Manoans were living on the island of Crete, seventy miles
Speaker 2: to the south. They were pretty sharp people. They had
Speaker 2: a navy, a writing system, multi story palaces with flushing
Speaker 2: toilets and indoor plumbing, beautiful frescoes, and they traded with Egypt,
Speaker 2: the Levant, and probably even as far as Spain, they
Speaker 2: would have heard the explosion and seeing the sky filled
Speaker 2: with ash, and in fact, archaeologists this was really interesting.
Speaker 2: I thought, archaeologists haven't covered an ancient city called Aquatiri,
Speaker 2: which was covered in ash from the explosion, basically like Pompeii.
Speaker 2: But what they didn't find in Aquatiri was a single body,
Speaker 2: leading them to believe that most of the city felt
Speaker 2: earthquakes before the explosion, and people kind of like organized
Speaker 2: and left so that they wouldn't be there when whatever
Speaker 2: they thought was coming finally hit. Well, why they never
Speaker 2: come back, Well, because most of them fled to crete.
Speaker 2: So the Minoans on the island of Therah knew that
Speaker 2: something was very wrong, and they knew enough to leave.
Speaker 2: They just didn't know that a tsunami was going to
Speaker 2: come for one of the places that they were most likely.
Speaker 3: To flee too.
Speaker 4: And it's like sometimes with tsunamis, if you're further away,
Speaker 4: it's worse because it gives it more time to fucking
Speaker 4: get yeah generate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh my god, I think I got out of here.
Speaker 2: So when the Theras tsunami hit Crete, the way wave
Speaker 2: we believe about fifty feet high and crushed the northern coast,
Speaker 2: wiping out settlements and ports. Geologists have found tsunami deposits
Speaker 2: at coastal sites where the wave came up to four
Speaker 2: hundred meters inland and ripped chunks of architecture out by
Speaker 2: the foundations. They even found a port at a place
Speaker 2: called Amnisos where the walls of the buildings were knocked
Speaker 2: completely out of alignment. They described it as looking like
Speaker 2: if someone had shoved the entire city sideways. So that's
Speaker 2: how powerful the wave was. According to National Geographic I
Speaker 2: thought this was really interesting too.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: Some scholars believe that the traumatic collective memory of this
Speaker 2: event gave birth to Plato's allegory of the sunken city
Speaker 2: of Atlantis, composed a thousand years later. But it was
Speaker 2: a strong enough disaster and a big enough disaster that
Speaker 2: whatever had been passed down that.
Speaker 3: Plato was trauma. Yea still ma art, Yeah, that's.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty one, archaeologists working had a site on
Speaker 2: the Turkish coast found the first theorist tsunami victims that
Speaker 2: we that we know about, a young man clutching his
Speaker 2: dog buried together in tsunami debris under a layer of
Speaker 2: therin volcanic ash. Scientists call it the double whammy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is like, this is the only real Pompei body
Speaker 2: they found, but they think the tsunami is actually what
Speaker 2: killed them because the tsunami debris is what was encasing him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the ash was on top of that. Oh wow, yeah, that's.
Speaker 7: Like he got buried.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he got buried by the tsunami and then the
Speaker 2: ash falling on.
Speaker 3: Top then then then frozen like an amber.
Speaker 6: Yeah, basically you think it's you think you'd spend a
Speaker 6: little extra time with those types of bodies when you
Speaker 6: find them, because be like God wanted us to find
Speaker 6: this one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know what I mean, Like, what's the clues?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I think they you know they sometimes
Speaker 2: I kinda this is this is well, I don't need
Speaker 2: to say it's morbid. This is you know what fucking
Speaker 2: podcast you're listening to. I think sometimes it'd be great
Speaker 2: to go out as a as a disaster victim like
Speaker 2: this and you're discovered thousands of years later, because.
Speaker 3: I find it amazing the one hand we can't see
Speaker 3: on camera and he's like that, it would be great
Speaker 3: to go out like I'm que jerking off.
Speaker 2: We going out this way? But no, like I don't know,
Speaker 2: there's something really like capital are romantic about the idea
Speaker 2: of you live your whole life, you're not necessarily important
Speaker 2: or interesting in your life, and then the way you
Speaker 2: die makes you incredibly rare and meaningful thousands of years later.
Speaker 4: Amanda and I have talked about this before too, because
Speaker 4: she has said I've said stuff like that before about
Speaker 4: like finding bodies or mummies or you know, we talk
Speaker 4: about a lot of stuff like that on the show,
Speaker 4: and she's always like, yeah, that's like the ideal, Like,
Speaker 4: oh my gosh, like two thousand years after you die,
Speaker 4: someone's still talking about you. Yeah, you're the hot You're
Speaker 4: the hot gossips in the long run, like everybody's got
Speaker 4: to die, usually.
Speaker 2: Usually for a good reason, you know, they're not usually
Speaker 2: digging up the mummy being like this fucking.
Speaker 3: We hate this guy.
Speaker 4: We're talking again.
Speaker 3: It's on the Ugly Boones Exhibit History.
Speaker 2: So then more than a thousand years later, in three
Speaker 2: sixty five CE, another tsunami was born from the fault
Speaker 2: lines near Crete, and this time we have beautifully written
Speaker 2: record of it. Thanks to the pen of Roman historian
Speaker 2: Amianos Mussellanos. This tsunami we know, hit on July twenty first,
Speaker 2: three sixty five, and I'm in that summers. It's a
Speaker 2: summer tsunami. There we go theme summer fear, Marcellinos wrote,
Speaker 2: And this is a bit of a long quote, but
Speaker 2: the writing is so good, I just wanted to read
Speaker 2: the whole thing.
Speaker 3: Lay it on us, all right, I'll take a break
Speaker 3: for a little.
Speaker 2: After daybreak, preceded by heavy and repeated thunder and lightning,
Speaker 2: the whole of the firm and solid earth was shaken
Speaker 2: and trembled. The sea, with its rolling waves, was driven
Speaker 2: back and withdrew from the land, so that in the
Speaker 2: abyss of the deep thus revealed men saw many kinds
Speaker 2: of sea creatures stuck fast in the slime and vast
Speaker 2: mountains and deep valleys, which Nature the Creator had hidden
Speaker 2: in the unplumbed depths. Then, as one might well believe,
Speaker 2: first saw the beams of the sun. Hence many ships
Speaker 2: were stranded as if on dry land. And since many
Speaker 2: men roamed about without fear in the little that remained
Speaker 2: of the waters to gather fish and similar things with
Speaker 2: their hands, the roaring sea, resenting as it were, this
Speaker 2: forced retreat, rose in its turn, and over the boiling shoals.
Speaker 2: It dashed mightily upon islands and broad stretches of the mainland,
Speaker 2: and leveled innumerable buildings in the cities and where else
Speaker 2: they were found, So that amid the mad discord of
Speaker 2: the elements, the altered face of the earth revealed marvelous sights.
Speaker 2: For the great mass of water, returning when it was
Speaker 2: least expected, killed many thousands of men by drowning, and
Speaker 2: by the swift recoil of the eddying tides, and number
Speaker 2: of ships after the swelling of the wet elements subsided
Speaker 2: were seen to have foundered, and lifeless bodies of shipwrecked
Speaker 2: persons lay floating on their backs or on their faces.
Speaker 2: Other great ships, driven by the mad blasts landed on
Speaker 2: tops of buildings, as happened at Alexandria, and some were
Speaker 2: driven almost two miles inland, like a Laconian ship, which
Speaker 2: I myself, in passing that way, saw near the town
Speaker 2: of Mathone yawning apart through long decay.
Speaker 4: So okay, So if the ships are too close to shore,
Speaker 4: they can get caught up in this wall and be
Speaker 4: like on top of the wall basically, yeah, and end
Speaker 4: up inland like, which is such a crazy.
Speaker 3: Like they got sucked out and then zip not sucked.
Speaker 4: Out like they were out, I mean, not even however
Speaker 4: far out, however far in it's coming right, Like, Okay,
Speaker 4: let's say you're only a mile off shore, but the
Speaker 4: water's going three miles in. You might just end up
Speaker 4: on top of this water fucking and into the devastation
Speaker 4: where if you're like five miles off shore, it might
Speaker 4: go completely under your ship. It might shift you closer
Speaker 4: to shore, but not all the way, you know what
Speaker 4: I mean?
Speaker 3: I do like that. His story was like the water
Speaker 3: receded and people are like, hey, free fish. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: the best day I fucking like.
Speaker 6: And then God was like, hey, no, free fish is
Speaker 6: the way he describes it.
Speaker 3: Yes, here comes a wall of water.
Speaker 4: Yeah here's this. Oh you greedy, little, greedy little guy
Speaker 4: a little bit. This is what you get. You get
Speaker 4: wall of water, You get water.
Speaker 3: Do I need to move away or tonight?
Speaker 5: Where from the ocean?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Do you want to move where they have blizzards and
Speaker 4: ice storms? Do you want to move where they have tornadoes?
Speaker 4: Do you want to move where they have hurricanes? Do
Speaker 4: you want to move where they have other earthquakes? Where
Speaker 4: you think is going to be safe?
Speaker 5: Do they have like none of those things somewhere.
Speaker 6: No, it does seem as though, and I'm not picking
Speaker 6: on Japan the way God seems to be, but it
Speaker 6: does seem like it goes westbore like you might end
Speaker 6: up to your point about should I move, seems like
Speaker 6: we end up with some residual tsunami stuff where it
Speaker 6: seems like they're getting tsunamis and rogue waves. It's that
Speaker 6: it's become part of their art and that they had
Speaker 6: a system in place for Hey, tell everybody there's a
Speaker 6: tsunami coming. So I don't know how much we're the
Speaker 6: recipient of full blown tsunamis.
Speaker 4: No, I think I think the Pacific Northwest is actually
Speaker 4: more in danger like day to day than we are.
Speaker 3: Then you're good, they're right here.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Actually, like southern California statistically speaking for natural disasters,
Speaker 4: I mean it's gotten worse obviously with wildfires recently, but
Speaker 4: like not where we live, and earthquakes and earthquakes, but
Speaker 4: even then, like once again, statistically speaking, we had our
Speaker 4: first hurricane in recorded history, and it was like a pitdlling,
Speaker 4: you know what I mean, And like we have tsunami
Speaker 4: warnings and it's like it's just high tides, stay away
Speaker 4: from the beach.
Speaker 3: I know that now.
Speaker 4: Not all of us could drive to sand Burn, Anita.
Speaker 6: If you if anyone's watching the video, there's very good
Speaker 6: chance that I have not fixed this camera, which means
Speaker 6: as white as I am on camera right now is
Speaker 6: as white as I was in bad that much.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, when I first heard it's.
Speaker 2: Soon on me alert, it's like it's like, you know,
Speaker 2: this is like your personal version of when Hawaii got
Speaker 2: the nuclear exactly, You're right, except you had they didn't
Speaker 2: have anywhere to go.
Speaker 4: How many people do you think ruined their life that day?
Speaker 4: Like they were like I've always wanted to leave my wife,
Speaker 4: I'm rushing, I'm rushing over to like this girl who
Speaker 4: I've had a crush on, you know, and I'm going
Speaker 4: to profess my love and she's my coworker. And then
Speaker 4: it like it didn't happen, Like do you think that
Speaker 4: guy was like really, that would have been a really
Speaker 4: nice of that new.
Speaker 3: Kid, Just say, guy standing in front of a girl
Speaker 3: at the for sure end of the world. The world.
Speaker 6: Guys, that's really funny because if she in real aft,
Speaker 6: there was no humor to be found on that day.
Speaker 6: It sounds really like the worst possible oops all of.
Speaker 4: Them are in I would hope deep deep therapy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I feel like I feel like that's going to be
Speaker 2: a real interesting population to study year after year as
Speaker 2: to see the effects of I mean, how often has
Speaker 2: there ever been something on that scale where that many people,
Speaker 2: you know, in a quantifiable, studiable way, we're told you
Speaker 2: are about to die, and then you can go study
Speaker 2: the population and ask questions.
Speaker 6: And I mean, am I outrageous for thinking it doesn't
Speaker 6: maybe matter in the sense that to us, the thing
Speaker 6: that's so interesting about it, Well, yeah, but I'm saying
Speaker 6: the interesting thing about this is that it wasn't a missile.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: But I imagine if you're living somewhere right now where
Speaker 6: you're probably getting missile alerts and there are probably missiles,
Speaker 6: but they don't hit you or the area you're in,
Speaker 6: even though it might have been a warning, how many
Speaker 6: of those in are you like, well, fuck it, the
Speaker 6: alert's going off.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I feel like that's one of you go one or
Speaker 4: two ways, like you either live in constant fear or
Speaker 4: you kind of like get so desensitized where you're like
Speaker 4: whatever whatever will be will be.
Speaker 3: This one's only interesting because there was no missile at.
Speaker 4: All, and because it was a one off. Right, like
Speaker 4: peow who are living in war zones, we know the
Speaker 4: psychology and like what happens and the damage that that
Speaker 4: does to your your psyche, Right, but like this is
Speaker 4: a very unique one off.
Speaker 2: It's basically like you experiment a couple thousand people with the.
Speaker 3: Fear gun, and you can stu trying to do.
Speaker 2: What that did to them for decades.
Speaker 4: Hey, we were just talking about the FBI and the
Speaker 4: CIA and the government experimenting on us without our consent?
Speaker 4: Have we ever thought that that was what they were doing?
Speaker 4: They hit them with the fear gun.
Speaker 2: Listen, as Ed said, if we can perfect the fear gun,
Speaker 2: we CIA, FBI, we are open for business here. It's
Speaker 2: scared all the time enterprises that really spread whatever rumors you.
Speaker 4: Need, we are willing to sell out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we just also found out that we're not getting
Speaker 3: paid enough to What were you going to say about China?
Speaker 2: Head, Maybe repeat that thing you were going to say
Speaker 2: about China and the horrible thing they did to the planet.
Speaker 6: Oh, I don't think it was horrible, but but.
Speaker 4: We're all because we're also open to Chinese money.
Speaker 3: If anybody in that case, it was never horrible at all.
Speaker 3: Like I'm happily.
Speaker 2: Listen, my kid is young enough. You can speak whatever
Speaker 2: language you want him to. So let's write the checks.
Speaker 3: Boys.
Speaker 2: Anyway, we're going to fast forward more than a thousand
Speaker 2: years and God, finally I travel halfway around the world
Speaker 2: to the Pacific coast of Japan because this case is
Speaker 2: really really interesting. It's the night of January twenty seventh
Speaker 2: in the year seventeen hundred. It's the twelfth lunar month
Speaker 2: of the twelfth year by the Japanese calendar, and that
Speaker 2: specificity becomes important later in this story. Ito, which is
Speaker 2: modern day Tokyo, has a million people in it, making
Speaker 2: it one of the biggest cities in the world, the biggest.
Speaker 3: It's seventeen hundred. That's crazy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 3: Out on the Pacific, that's.
Speaker 6: That kind of thing where water gets to talking. Yeah,
Speaker 6: we can get a lot in one go here, boys.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Out on the Pacific coast of Hanshu, fishermen are asleep
Speaker 2: the villages are quiet, and suddenly as soon I'm comes
Speaker 2: rushing in. It destroyed fields and houses and rice patties
Speaker 2: and tire fishing operations. It put four meters of water
Speaker 2: on the coast. Just like every tsunami. It killed people,
Speaker 2: it destroyed homes. It's not nearly as dramatic and destructive
Speaker 2: as the previous waves that we've just talked about. What
Speaker 2: it is, though, is extremely well documented. We don't have
Speaker 2: just one source like this previous tsunami. We have six,
Speaker 2: six different writers scattered across six hundred miles of coastline.
Speaker 2: Each documented the arrival of the wave. These were local officials,
Speaker 2: head men, merchants, and their records survive in temple archives,
Speaker 2: in family papers, and in disaster reports. Filed up the
Speaker 2: chain of command to the shogunate, who I think was
Speaker 2: like maybe the mayor or something, doesn't matter.
Speaker 6: The reason is some and for the purposes of our show,
Speaker 6: we're moving on.
Speaker 2: It was filed up the chain of command. People kept
Speaker 2: very detailed records of this wave. And the reason that
Speaker 2: so many people took note and wrote about the tsunami
Speaker 2: is because, like I said near the beginning of this episode,
Speaker 2: the Japanese to use this phrase that Ed Loves made.
Speaker 3: What a different episode. Oh yeah, that was a different show.
Speaker 3: They're gonna be like fucking drunk racist yo, he made
Speaker 3: himself whiter on.
Speaker 4: Purpose, first himself out.
Speaker 2: Like I said, near the beginning of this episode, the
Speaker 2: Japanese made it their beeswax to understand tsunamis. They know
Speaker 2: the rules and how they work, and this one did
Speaker 2: not seem to follow the rules. Primarily, there was no
Speaker 2: earthquake preceding it, which was very weird because while they
Speaker 2: might not have had in this advanced model of the
Speaker 2: physics of tsunamis, the coastal Japanese knew that tsunamis didn't
Speaker 2: just show up and come racing ashore for no reason.
Speaker 4: Did they think that maybe somebody dropped like a lot
Speaker 4: of submarines or as.
Speaker 3: A submarine landslide.
Speaker 2: This bothered Japanese scholars for a very long time. Obviously,
Speaker 2: the suspicion outside of the submarine landslide was that there
Speaker 2: was an earthquake that happened somewhere too far away to
Speaker 2: feel that triggered the waves, possibly somewhere else in the
Speaker 2: Pacific rim which is a very.
Speaker 3: Active like those movies theologically active.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's where they came from. I think from
Speaker 4: an earthquake.
Speaker 3: Let them loose, right, yeah, I think it was a
Speaker 3: split in the ocean. Yeah, yeah, well this is more.
Speaker 3: They didn't know about that back then. They didn't know
Speaker 3: those robots that did it. They did it. But the
Speaker 3: thing the robots fought aliens, it's unclear. Kaiju kaiju.
Speaker 2: As the centuries progressed, people kept trying to answer this
Speaker 2: question of what cause. They called it an orphan tsunami,
Speaker 2: which happened enough that there's a term for them, because you.
Speaker 4: Don't know it's mother. Wow, that's so good.
Speaker 2: So people were trying to figure out what caused this
Speaker 2: orphan tsunami. The quake they know would have had to
Speaker 2: have been huge because the wave was big enough to
Speaker 2: put meters of water onto the shore and wipe out
Speaker 2: all these homes. So someone somewhere in seventeen hundred would
Speaker 2: have had a record of this earthquake. They checked South
Speaker 2: America because they all to the giant Chilean earthquake could
Speaker 2: have sent a wave across the Pacific without anyone in
Speaker 2: Japan feeling the quake.
Speaker 3: They checked, No, no, no, They sent a guide down this
Speaker 3: no more modern.
Speaker 2: As I said, as the centuries progressed, scholars tried to
Speaker 2: solve this mystery. So they checked Chile, they checked come Chatka,
Speaker 2: they checked the history of the Aleutian Islands.
Speaker 4: But what if you're like, I mean, everyone nobody had
Speaker 4: like a consolidated telling time thing, Well, oh shit, what
Speaker 4: if they wrote down like, oh, it's thirteen thirty six
Speaker 4: Jesus before cry.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think these scholars were trying to do their best
Speaker 2: piece together a mystery and hope that if someone had
Speaker 2: a record of it, they could try to line up
Speaker 2: their dates with the Japanese dates.
Speaker 4: And I'm sorry, that's just something I actually never once
Speaker 4: actually thought about when we're like comparing ancient records, especially yes,
Speaker 4: the difference in how people the different calendars. I never
Speaker 4: thought about that till right now, which seems fuck stupid. No,
Speaker 4: But but I really never thought about.
Speaker 3: That all because a lot of time. To find the
Speaker 3: Rosetta Stone in a different way, you'd have to find
Speaker 3: like who's.
Speaker 6: Writing about something that multiple nations would have seen at
Speaker 6: the same time.
Speaker 4: Like yeah, like a comment or yeah, or a.
Speaker 6: Comment or Haley's comic came in at oh eleven fifty
Speaker 6: and it was like, really actually.
Speaker 3: Says three, Yeah, came in year three. I must be
Speaker 3: thinking of a different comment. That would be an interesting
Speaker 3: bonus episode to do, Like I don't I have. I'm
Speaker 3: sure there are like why is ed always late? The
Speaker 3: calendar mystery.
Speaker 2: I'm sure there is, like a calendar of Rosette. There
Speaker 2: must be like some you know.
Speaker 3: Someone should have calendar. I think that sound Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 3: they checked all these places.
Speaker 2: None of them had a record of a giant earthquake
Speaker 2: on the night of January's twenty sixth or twenty seventh,
Speaker 2: seventeen hundred and Japanese record keeping, we know, was super precise,
Speaker 2: so there wasn't a question as to the correct date
Speaker 2: within a day or two of the Japanese The mystery
Speaker 2: was just everything else. Then three centuries later, in the
Speaker 2: late nineteen eighty US, a US Geological Service geologist named
Speaker 2: Brian Atwater started digging up a dead forest, and he
Speaker 2: not only solved this mystery, but he uncovered a looming
Speaker 2: natural disaster that should scare the shit out of anyone
Speaker 2: living on the West coast of America.
Speaker 3: Wait, why did he get money? Sorry?
Speaker 4: And I just made you feel good about living here.
Speaker 3: This is the story of the really really really big one.
Speaker 7: Are you okay?
Speaker 5: It's fine, It's fine.
Speaker 2: So there is a seven hundred mile fault that runs
Speaker 2: off the west coast of North America. A fault line,
Speaker 2: as I think we briefly touched on earlier, is where
Speaker 2: the earth tectonic plates meet and build up pressure for hundreds,
Speaker 2: if not thousands of years. Eventually that pressure gets to
Speaker 2: be too much and the plates, yeah, they edged for
Speaker 2: thousands of years.
Speaker 3: The plates slip past each.
Speaker 2: Other, unleashing all of that energy into an earthquake that
Speaker 2: we feel above ground.
Speaker 4: If I'm not crazy, Amanda, I don't think he's even
Speaker 4: talking about the San Andreas fault.
Speaker 3: It's not the San Andres.
Speaker 5: I was just going to say, literally, no, what that means.
Speaker 5: There's two.
Speaker 4: This one's like I said, the Pacific Northwest. That's not us.
Speaker 3: That's it's finally going to get its come up.
Speaker 4: And get it to day in the sun.
Speaker 3: It's day under this day in the dark water.
Speaker 2: I love everybody. I figuring out where this is going.
Speaker 3: Okay, I will say this.
Speaker 2: Will end up being very very bad news, probably for
Speaker 2: California due to knock on effects. But oh, Yeah, there's
Speaker 2: a lot of things that can go very very wrong here.
Speaker 2: But this particular fault line correct, this is not the
Speaker 2: San Andreas fault.
Speaker 3: Uh. This particular fault line starts.
Speaker 2: Around Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and it runs the
Speaker 2: entire length of Washington State, the entire length of Oregon,
Speaker 2: and down into northern California before tapering off near Cape Mendocino.
Speaker 2: This is called the Cascadia subduction Zone. It's where the
Speaker 2: Juan de Fuca plate is grinding underneath the North American
Speaker 2: plate about an inch and a half a year.
Speaker 4: It's like it's really far like an eighth grade formal
Speaker 4: in there.
Speaker 2: Pretty much until unlike an eighth grade formal, scientists assumed
Speaker 2: that this grinding plate was basically asleep. It was basically
Speaker 2: just creeping. There were no big earthquakes, nothing to worry about.
Speaker 2: And then Brian Goddamn mother fucking Atwater started studying the
Speaker 2: ghost forests, or the patches of forest along the Washington
Speaker 2: and Oregon coast where the western red cedars are all dead.
Speaker 2: And for a long time this has been a mystery.
Speaker 3: And they're above ground, they're.
Speaker 2: Above ground, they're just dead, dead trees not rotting, just
Speaker 2: sitting there dead and that way they're bleached. You may
Speaker 2: have seen pictures of these. They are really striking image.
Speaker 3: You're seeing it right now. Have you watched them the video?
Speaker 3: That's right, that's right. I'm a ghost forest.
Speaker 2: You are a ghost You are one example of a
Speaker 2: ghost forest. But do you know what killed you? No,
Speaker 2: you don't have to have an answer to that because
Speaker 2: for a long time, nobody knew what killed you. That's
Speaker 2: why Brian got Lindsay Lohan.
Speaker 3: Was that movie the strip movie?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Anyway, no one could explain.
Speaker 4: A stripper in that movie, isn't she?
Speaker 2: Yeah, just to wipe help get the confusion off of
Speaker 2: Amanda's face. They're talking about the Lindsay Lohan classic where
Speaker 2: she plays a stripper who is killed and her ghost
Speaker 2: nose who killed her. It's a very bad midnight movie.
Speaker 5: I have never seen this Lindsay Lohan movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it might be a good it might be a
Speaker 2: good streaming watch.
Speaker 4: Who should we do a movie night?
Speaker 3: You might need to do a movie night.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But anyway, this guy was like, this is weird.
Speaker 3: I want to figure out why these trees are all dead.
Speaker 2: No one's ever figured this out before, so he dug
Speaker 2: into the sediment and found something kind of unexpected. He
Speaker 2: found a thin sheet of ocean sand resting on top
Speaker 2: of buried pete or bassed pete, is basically like ancient
Speaker 2: forest floor. The sand was evidence that the tsunami had
Speaker 2: swept inland and deposited the layer, but the way that
Speaker 2: it was stacked on top of the ancient forest floor
Speaker 2: or the peat, suggested that the land had been just
Speaker 2: a normal coastal forest and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: in a split second, it had dropped several feet into
Speaker 2: the water right before a wave came in and dumped
Speaker 2: this sand everywhere. At the same time that he was
Speaker 2: studying all this big bad Brian teamed up with a
Speaker 2: Japanese scientist named David Yamaguchi, who specializes in what sounds
Speaker 2: like an incredibly boring science called dendro chronology, the study
Speaker 2: of growth ring patterns in trees.
Speaker 4: Okay, that's actually very cool.
Speaker 5: I was gonna say that is incredibly boring.
Speaker 6: Oh well, we're of two minds on this podcast, and
Speaker 6: I will never say how I feel about David.
Speaker 2: And in this case, David's job is actually pretty cool
Speaker 2: because he took samples of these cedar rings and found
Speaker 2: that every tree in this forest had died simultaneously. Ooh tree,
Speaker 2: the last ring that had grown dated to the summer
Speaker 2: of sixteen ninety nine.
Speaker 3: That's fucking cool.
Speaker 5: That's what I get. We're saying it was boring.
Speaker 3: No, no, it's still boring.
Speaker 6: But like the reveal at the end of the boring
Speaker 6: task is like, if only is someone who had this
Speaker 6: job had more friends, you know what I mean?
Speaker 4: They to tell Yeah, if only they had a podcast.
Speaker 6: Yeah, bringing around David and Bryan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh my god. Can you that's endless content Going
Speaker 3: through the history of each tree ring by ring, there
Speaker 3: would be no forest left. Decade of success of that
Speaker 3: came in. They could do.
Speaker 4: A crossover with the people who like read the sediment
Speaker 4: layers and like the larth you know what I mean?
Speaker 6: And serial killers who thought you can age ladies by
Speaker 6: the rings inside if you cut them open.
Speaker 3: Are there serial killers that thought that? I don't know
Speaker 3: I'm cutting that anyone?
Speaker 2: Okay, you're cutting that out like a serial killer takes
Speaker 2: out a rings of a woman.
Speaker 4: So god, you guys got to start doing a blooper
Speaker 4: real life.
Speaker 5: Everything you want to cut is too good, and out
Speaker 5: of context it.
Speaker 3: Would be even funny, too good, more work for me.
Speaker 2: So the trees were alive at the end of the
Speaker 2: summer of sixteen ninety nine and dead by the time. Anyway,
Speaker 2: as you probably have guessed, this means that something very
Speaker 2: big had happened on the Pacific Northwest coast between August
Speaker 2: of sixteen ninety nine in May of seventeen hundred.
Speaker 3: Something to scare the forest. Isn't that a thing? That's
Speaker 3: something fied forest? That is that is a term.
Speaker 2: Uh, that's something in this case rhymes with giant fucking earthquake.
Speaker 2: Because David Yamaguchi started working with Brian to produce models
Speaker 2: of what could have caused this, and it turns out
Speaker 2: that if a magnitude nine earthquake popped off on the
Speaker 2: Cascadia Subduction Zone at roughly nine o'clock at night Pacific
Speaker 2: standard time on January twenty sixth, seventeen hundred, it would
Speaker 2: have traveled across the ocean at about the speed of
Speaker 2: a seven forty seven and arrived in the middle of
Speaker 2: the night in Japan.
Speaker 3: Two things.
Speaker 6: One mystery to think, yeah, it doesn't just rhyme with
Speaker 6: it is actually those words.
Speaker 3: Yes, two anything over on this guy.
Speaker 6: I was gonna say mystery soft, but you beat me
Speaker 6: to it, which is to say that this guy was like,
Speaker 6: fuck whatever Chili's do.
Speaker 3: And we know, yeah, they knew. I'm badgering the Chileans.
Speaker 3: They don't have answers.
Speaker 2: But here's the thing. Not only did they not have
Speaker 2: anyone to tell. Even if they did, there wasn't much
Speaker 2: celebrating to do because the scientists also realized that this
Speaker 2: same earthquake would have sent a tsunami barreling into the
Speaker 2: West coast of North America in about fifteen minutes, and
Speaker 2: that tsunami would have been lots bigger than what ultimately
Speaker 2: hit Japan that night.
Speaker 6: Do you think, why don't they're already dig in the ground,
Speaker 6: They're already looking at sediment. Why don't they dig a
Speaker 6: little deeper and just see, Like, all right, if this
Speaker 6: amount of deep in sediment is sixteen sixty nine, then
Speaker 6: the next the mount deep and sediment we can establish
Speaker 6: it's probably fifteen ninety nine or some so you can
Speaker 6: carbon date what have you.
Speaker 3: I'd be looking for the other time, all the.
Speaker 6: Trees died to be like, all right, does this happen
Speaker 6: every sixty years or is there something we can use
Speaker 6: to fucking how does this help us for tomorrow?
Speaker 1: Ed?
Speaker 2: You need to talk to a guy named Chris Goldfinger
Speaker 2: at Oregon State University because they realized that this was
Speaker 2: a huge problem.
Speaker 3: Is that the school that's Beaver's or the.
Speaker 4: Ducks, I don't know, Morgan State that is the exactly
Speaker 4: no one knows.
Speaker 3: Probably the Savanna Bananas.
Speaker 4: That's the Savannah Bananas callback.
Speaker 2: Two episodes in one show ago. So anyone listening to this, well, no,
Speaker 2: eight hours.
Speaker 3: We spent a week with these girls one night.
Speaker 2: Anyway, The Cascadia subduction zone that's seven hundred mile fault
Speaker 2: is still down there, and it has been locked in
Speaker 2: place since it shifted that nine pm at Pacific Standard
Speaker 2: time January twenties.
Speaker 3: Stop grinding that day.
Speaker 2: It's but just for three hundred and twenty six years.
Speaker 2: It will grind again, and that is what Oregon State.
Speaker 3: You can kick me out of this dance, but I will.
Speaker 3: There will be more dances.
Speaker 2: Chris Goldfinger has dedicated his life to pulling up sediment
Speaker 2: cores from the ocean floor. Again, these guys questionable decisions
Speaker 2: about to dedicate their lives to, but they are figuring
Speaker 2: out so much shit. He has spent much of his
Speaker 2: career looking for something called turbidites, or basically these distinct
Speaker 2: layers of mud left behind by massive underwater landslides every
Speaker 2: time that fault line snaps. And thanks to his work,
Speaker 2: we have a ten thousand year history of the Cascadias
Speaker 2: temper tantrums, and the math is not great. For people
Speaker 2: living in the Upper West coast of the United States.
Speaker 2: On average, a major rupture happens every four to five
Speaker 2: hundred years. Again, it has been three hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: six years since this last one.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, where we do so right?
Speaker 3: I'm gonna be an old piece of ship swimming. We'll
Speaker 3: be dead right well, right now, I live in another
Speaker 3: forty years.
Speaker 4: Give me forty years. I don't think you're fourhundred with
Speaker 4: every four hundred years and we're twenty six.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you said through twenty six.
Speaker 3: We're three twenty six, so how many years, and so four.
Speaker 5: Hundred seventy five years I'll be the good Well.
Speaker 3: Fuck these other kids.
Speaker 4: These kids are fucked.
Speaker 5: I just said quick math, Okay, I couldn't.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it is faster, just two or three hundred years,
Speaker 2: and sometimes it takes closer to a millennium. So right
Speaker 2: now we are sitting in the seventy fifth percentile of
Speaker 2: that historical win.
Speaker 4: We're right in the sweet spot.
Speaker 2: We've outlasted three out of every four gaps.
Speaker 3: Between these mega quills.
Speaker 4: Oh that's not good.
Speaker 3: This is not good.
Speaker 2: And the problem is, as as one of the articles
Speaker 2: I read put it, there's just enough time between quakes
Speaker 2: to build a civilization exactly where it's going to hit,
Speaker 2: because right now there are more people living in harm's
Speaker 2: way than ever before. There is evidence a big chunk
Speaker 2: that I sort of stepped around because it was there's
Speaker 2: a lot of maybe and maybe that's but there does
Speaker 2: seem to be a large, at least folk record of
Speaker 2: various Native American tribes who have legends sort of dating
Speaker 2: to around the period that this Japanese quake would have happened.
Speaker 4: Living like cyclically in this area, like, hey, don't go
Speaker 4: around these times, exactly need to move out. We've been
Speaker 4: here too long.
Speaker 2: Ye yeah, and or legends of you know this Godvillaga god.
Speaker 3: Yes, but we're not like, hey, let's pick up San
Speaker 3: Francisco and get out of here. Well, we're right, we
Speaker 3: can't do that now. But my point, my point, you
Speaker 3: can us four, we can make a compound somewhere else.
Speaker 2: There is a history to civilizations saying, hey, this might
Speaker 2: be a bad news area. But because you know, the
Speaker 2: Americans who founded this country and the Native Americans didn't
Speaker 2: have the best relationship, I think a lot of people went,
Speaker 2: who gives a fuck, I don't care what your legend says.
Speaker 2: So we are in the cool zone, we can call it.
Speaker 2: And one of the scariest articles that I have ever
Speaker 2: read for this show is about exactly what might happen.
Speaker 2: Back in twenty fifteen, Catherine Schultz wrote a piece for
Speaker 2: The New Yorker titled The Really Big One, which both
Speaker 2: snags were Pulitzer and ruined my day a decade later.
Speaker 3: This is the woman who did the episode. When we
Speaker 3: did the Big One episode, we touched on this in
Speaker 3: the Big One episode. We didn't read the article.
Speaker 4: This article is a heavy duty. Yeah, I've read it
Speaker 4: more than once.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's a really well written article and you definitely
Speaker 2: should go read it. I'll put it in the show
Speaker 2: notes so you can read the whole thing. But in
Speaker 2: this article, she talks to Kenneth Murphy, a regional director
Speaker 2: for FEMA, and she asks what the government is expecting
Speaker 2: when the fault finally snaps exist, and his reply is, quote,
Speaker 2: our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate five
Speaker 2: will be toast.
Speaker 4: So if you're toasts, the technical term.
Speaker 3: That's ah my god, FEMA.
Speaker 2: If you're unfamiliar with Interstate five, it is the massive
Speaker 2: freeway that connects Mexico to Canada. And I don't think
Speaker 2: he means everything tipped to tail. He's talking about the
Speaker 2: entire coastline of Oregon, in Washington, chunks of Portland, most
Speaker 2: of Olympia. Seven million people live in the area that
Speaker 2: he says bets. As detailed in the article, the earthquake
Speaker 2: itself will be absolutely nightmares. Just one passage to illustrate quote.
Speaker 2: The shaking from the Cascadia quake will set off landslides
Speaker 2: throughout the region, up to thirty thousand of them in
Speaker 2: Seattle alone. The city's Emergency Management Office estimates it will
Speaker 2: also induce a process called liquefaction, whereby seemingly solid grounds
Speaker 2: starts behaving like a liquid to the detriment, as she
Speaker 2: puts it, of anything sitting on top of it.
Speaker 4: It's literally like everything becomes quicksand yes.
Speaker 2: Fifteen percent of Seattle is built on liquefiable land, including
Speaker 2: and grunge, including seventeen daycare centers and the homes of
Speaker 2: some thirty four thousand, five hundred people. So is Oregon's
Speaker 2: critical energy infrastructure hub. This seems like a completely insane decision,
Speaker 2: and I just I guess they didn't know. But this
Speaker 2: is a six mile stretch of Portland through which flows
Speaker 2: ninety percent of the state's liquid fuel and also houses
Speaker 2: everything from electrical substations to natural gas terminals. So together
Speaker 2: the slashing, sliding, and shaking of liquefaction will cause fires, flooding,
Speaker 2: pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous material spills. Any one
Speaker 2: of these second order disasters could swamp the original earthquake
Speaker 2: in terms of cost, damage or casualties, and one of
Speaker 2: them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs
Speaker 2: start barking, the shaking will subside, and for another few
Speaker 2: minutes the region up ended will continue to fall apart
Speaker 2: on its own. Then the wave will arrive and the
Speaker 2: real destruction will begin.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's pre wave, that's pre that's all.
Speaker 4: That's just from the earthquake.
Speaker 3: I'll know I'll never see the wave. I'll be like
Speaker 3: and good day.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I see what's happening here, and I'm gonna just
Speaker 6: dip off the side of this building.
Speaker 3: Now, this article is yeah, oh yeah, yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3: Wait dogs started barking. I was God.
Speaker 2: This article was written in twenty fifteen, so maybe something
Speaker 2: has changed by now. But in the article they say
Speaker 2: Kevin Couples the city planner for the town of Seaside, Oregon.
Speaker 3: Joke sounds like a planner of relationships.
Speaker 5: I say, every single one of these names almost sounds.
Speaker 3: Like crazy Wally Golden Finger and Kevin Matchmaker.
Speaker 2: Who is the detective in the New Fur Unlocked? Uh
Speaker 2: if you are not subscribed to our patreon, subscribe to
Speaker 2: the patreon and go listen to the New Fur Unlocked
Speaker 2: about the Wild West, something ukble murder mystery.
Speaker 3: It's some like it's a word for like being right.
Speaker 4: It works out that way, Like how is the guy
Speaker 4: who solves like cold case crimes? His last name as holes?
Speaker 4: Like what's the hole in this?
Speaker 3: You know? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Like sometimes you just something and you're like, I swear
Speaker 4: to god, I'm not making this up.
Speaker 6: No, his name is something like it might as well
Speaker 6: be like Cowboy like Harrison always right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was like something sharp.
Speaker 2: It was something sharp, but it was like it was
Speaker 2: a crazy It was like significant sharp or something.
Speaker 6: If somebody who's listening to this now it can go
Speaker 6: listen to that episode and then comment what the name was,
Speaker 6: that would help add out a lot.
Speaker 3: Please anyway.
Speaker 2: Kevin Couples, a part time a Cupid for the town
Speaker 2: of Seaside, Oregon, jokes that people will only be notified
Speaker 2: it's time to flee the earthquake itself by what he
Speaker 2: calls a vibrate alert system, which he means there is
Speaker 2: no there is no system here. I see the earthquake.
Speaker 2: It's happening. That's how you'll know to leave. And people
Speaker 2: will be urged to leave on foot. Since the earthquake
Speaker 2: will render roads impassable, depending on location, they will only
Speaker 2: have between ten and thirty minutes to escape the path
Speaker 2: of the wave. That timeline does not allow for finding
Speaker 2: a flashlight, tending to an earthquake injury, hesitating amid the
Speaker 2: ruins of your home, searching for loved ones, or being
Speaker 2: a good Samaritan.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: When that tsunami is coming, you run, says Jay Wilson.
Speaker 2: The chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission,
Speaker 2: or as pack. You protect yourself, you don't turn around,
Speaker 2: you don't go back to save anybody. You run for
Speaker 2: your life. Twenty two percent of Oregon's coastal population is
Speaker 2: sixty five or older. Twenty nine percent of the state's
Speaker 2: population is disabled, and that figure rises in many coastal counties.
Speaker 3: There's seventy five. Now this is ten year old article.
Speaker 2: Yeah, quote, we can't save them. Kevin Couple says, I'm
Speaker 2: not going to sugarcoat it and say, oh, yeah, we'll
Speaker 2: go around and check on the elderly.
Speaker 3: No, we won't.
Speaker 4: Honestly, I like actually appreciate his candor, yeah, because I
Speaker 4: feel like the problem with a lot of like emergency preparedness. Okay,
Speaker 4: so I'm from like a small town, yeah, and I've
Speaker 4: known some preppers and grew up in Arizona, knew some preppers,
Speaker 4: new people whose families were preppers. And I feel like
Speaker 4: the one thing they get right is they're like extremely
Speaker 4: realistic about what you can actually achieve, right, Like so
Speaker 4: like for example, like I know, Amanda a Manna is
Speaker 4: like I would need to be corralling my animals and
Speaker 4: I would need to be doing this. And I'm like,
Speaker 4: then you're gonna die with your animals like that. If
Speaker 4: it's so bad that your animals are going to die immediately,
Speaker 4: you all you will die with them. I'm not I'm
Speaker 4: not leaving them, no, And I think that that's fair.
Speaker 4: I'm just saying we need to be realistic right about
Speaker 4: about what is realistic.
Speaker 6: And also I like that this guy gave me a
Speaker 6: defense for my actions that day. I told no one
Speaker 6: I was, got in my car and drove.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, like you're he would. He would have applauded.
Speaker 4: He was. He was personally testing random people and you
Speaker 4: passed the test.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Oh my god. You hear that outside the.
Speaker 4: Dogs, please Jesus.
Speaker 2: Even worse, the article documents in elementary school in the
Speaker 2: community of gear Heart, where the children will be trapped
Speaker 2: quote they can't make it out from that school, Superintendent
Speaker 2: Doug Dougherty says they have no place to go. On
Speaker 2: one side lies the ocean, on the other a wide,
Speaker 2: roadless bog when the tsunami comes. The only place to
Speaker 2: go in Gearhart is a small ridge just behind the school.
Speaker 2: At its tallest, it is forty five feet high. Lower
Speaker 2: than the expected wave in a full margin earthquake. For now,
Speaker 2: the route to the ridge is marked by signs that
Speaker 2: say temporary tsunami assembly area, stop it it rais it temporary?
Speaker 3: Indeed? Once he hits it, I don't even like that.
Speaker 6: Hi, this is a person who's looking at the world
Speaker 6: through the eyes of a tsunami.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is an insane way to live. They're just like, Oh,
Speaker 3: you built to school here. Interesting? Interesting you did that.
Speaker 4: This guy, I've never heard anything more relatable.
Speaker 6: Okay, I thought I thought he'd be bad at parties,
Speaker 6: But you want to have a second marriage now, Like,
Speaker 6: you're just obsessed with this person.
Speaker 4: No, I just I would have invited him to the
Speaker 4: wedding if I knew.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and he'd probably be like, woof, it's actually be
Speaker 6: pumps vague and.
Speaker 4: You would have bummed everyone out. And I would have
Speaker 4: been like, guys, if you met have you met couples
Speaker 4: over here? Sorry, this is my celebrity guests talk to
Speaker 4: couples about what's gonna happen in the Pacific Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 3: And he's like, Vegas perfect where you want to be.
Speaker 3: This is truly he's about to be side property.
Speaker 4: Have you guys seen that movie Knock at the Cabin.
Speaker 3: Movie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the scene where the scene I'm going to
Speaker 4: talk to the one person who's seen it sign, Oh
Speaker 4: you've seen it, Okay, the scene where there the tsunami happens.
Speaker 4: That is, this is the scenario in that movie that happens.
Speaker 4: They talk about this ridge in the in the news articles.
Speaker 4: That's what they're saying. We're we're talking about it and
Speaker 4: it's on a beach in in the Pacific Northwest. When
Speaker 4: they have that scene where all the water goes back
Speaker 4: and there's like people out on the beach. That's literally
Speaker 4: there's like, that's what they talk about in that movie
Speaker 4: as this is the thing that happened to Pennsylvania.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you'll never be closer to m Night in your life.
Speaker 3: You gotta go hit him up and be like, know
Speaker 3: about ridges.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll get him on the pod. He doesn't seem
Speaker 2: like a busy man at all.
Speaker 3: Tom's gonna be a twists. The twist would be him
Speaker 3: showing up. That would be pretty crazy. Yeah. So yeah,
Speaker 3: I think we'll leave it there.
Speaker 2: I feel like I've given you all enough nightmares to
Speaker 2: think about as you try to fall asleep and wonder
Speaker 2: when that when the Juan Dea is going to act
Speaker 2: up like an eighth grader and start grinding.
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh man, so much pre come.
Speaker 3: Oh Jesus, I went. I thought this will be the
Speaker 3: episode we don't say pre come, and I feel like
Speaker 3: we have.
Speaker 4: Two beautiful ladies on the show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is definitely not.
Speaker 2: Well technically we did say it.
Speaker 3: Without pre com We can leave the number right where
Speaker 3: it is.
Speaker 2: Okay, before either of you go any further with that
Speaker 2: train of thought, we have to rate Tsunamis on a
Speaker 2: fear tier.
Speaker 3: Ladies.
Speaker 2: You are our guests today. So where do we put
Speaker 2: Tsunamis on a skin?
Speaker 5: Really quick? Because I still don't really know how they
Speaker 5: don't Okay, if they don't break, how do they diminish?
Speaker 3: They eventually? Yeah?
Speaker 2: They They think of it just like a giant flood,
Speaker 2: Like there's a nut. When the water is fully displaced
Speaker 2: and it completely runs out of the energy of whatever
Speaker 2: pushed it in that direction, it recedes, Okay, it.
Speaker 3: Just goes back to the ocean eventually, yeah, or just
Speaker 3: goes into a sewer.
Speaker 2: Well or wherever water. Yeah, I mean it takes a
Speaker 2: long time.
Speaker 6: I mean it's water, So I guess it goes to
Speaker 6: the path of least resistance always.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so it it depending on how low lying
Speaker 2: the area is. It can just come in and sit
Speaker 2: there for a long time. I don't know the actual
Speaker 2: tidal effects.
Speaker 6: What if you're a what if you're a tsunami. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and now you're here, I am, I'm in your in
Speaker 6: your neighborhood.
Speaker 3: Like what if it went into a lake. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: there's some lakes with tsunami water probably just going yeah,
Speaker 3: probably I'm salty.
Speaker 5: That water's confused.
Speaker 3: That's not salty. Confused.
Speaker 2: One sounds a good sequel to Pixar's Waves. You have
Speaker 2: lake water, that would be that.
Speaker 4: That would actually be the short that would play before it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: salt if you confused lake water?
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the salty is the salty water moves in
Speaker 2: next door and it's all grumpy and salt.
Speaker 5: It doesn't even want to be there, No, because that's salty.
Speaker 4: It's like we are in the wrong life cycle of
Speaker 4: the steelhead trout. Only real fish heads will get that one.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, dude, hit us up. If you're into weather,
Speaker 3: if you're into fish.
Speaker 4: I'm realizing now that I have the I have the
Speaker 4: interests of.
Speaker 3: A of a much older man.
Speaker 4: I was going to say, a very bullied seven year old.
Speaker 6: I feel like you find the interesting interests. You're talking
Speaker 6: about it in this advanced age.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you're like a grumpy old man.
Speaker 3: You're a grumpy old man from the film Grumpy Old Man.
Speaker 4: To be grumpy.
Speaker 6: Feel like you'll get there when kids keep being like,
Speaker 6: I hate what you like, and then you'll turn into.
Speaker 3: A grumpy I was.
Speaker 4: I was at a I was at a baseball game
Speaker 4: yesterday and this little girl.
Speaker 3: Was it banana.
Speaker 4: It was the savanna bananas. How do you know? And
Speaker 4: this little girl kept climbing over the bleachers and I
Speaker 4: just and I kept going, this is this is really
Speaker 4: gonna piss me off when she falls down and hurts herself.
Speaker 4: And my friends are like, what do you mean it's
Speaker 4: gonna piss you off? And I was like, because it's preventable,
Speaker 4: and she's gonna cry. And then sure enough, she fell
Speaker 4: down on her herself. She started crying real, real loud,
Speaker 4: and I was like, see there, what did I say?
Speaker 4: What did I say? And I was like, geez, Louise, okay.
Speaker 3: Grandpa, fucking ma rats, I get that kid. Off.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was like, this is an astar waiting to happen.
Speaker 4: All right, what tsunamis. I'm going to give tsunamis a
Speaker 4: solid It's hard to give it like too high of
Speaker 4: a number because I don't think that I'm and this
Speaker 4: is knock on wood, I don't think I'm in the
Speaker 4: like danger zone like as much as so many other
Speaker 4: places in the world.
Speaker 3: We're pretty close.
Speaker 5: We are.
Speaker 4: Like once again, you look at all the times we've
Speaker 4: even had tsunami warnings where I live.
Speaker 5: And who's to say when the big earthquake happens, we
Speaker 5: don't get a fucking tsunami, which big earthquake means.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think the San Andrea's fault would cause
Speaker 2: a tsunami because it's not gonna display the earth that's
Speaker 2: slipping is not beneath the water.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6: But companies that are doing well don't need to lay
Speaker 6: people off. But when they see other companies that do
Speaker 6: well lay people off, they feel.
Speaker 3: Like they can do it too. So San Andrea's fault
Speaker 3: goes off. Now you've got Ricky Pacific going right.
Speaker 4: This is that actually is a thing that people think
Speaker 4: that there's like a trifecta effect that could happen if
Speaker 4: anyone wants to be even more scared from this story
Speaker 4: that either one the San Andreas or the Pacific Northwest
Speaker 4: fault could hit and trigger the other one, and then
Speaker 4: that could trigger the super volcano that's under Yosemite.
Speaker 3: He's nervous about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think about that more than any Probably that's
Speaker 4: when I think about a lot, because that's gonna be worldwide.
Speaker 4: That's like that's like second Ice Age ship.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, because we've we've created these civilizations. I mean
Speaker 2: not just not not just in the lulls between tsunamis,
Speaker 2: but I think that's something in in in Earth time.
Speaker 2: Humans have been around for such a small amount of
Speaker 2: time that we've never really experienced the bad stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 2: never really experienced how bad it can really get.
Speaker 4: And that's how I feel every time we talk about
Speaker 4: these like mega events, and especially living where we live,
Speaker 4: where we don't experience like radical hurricanes and you know,
Speaker 4: devastating things beside wildfire fires are really our biggest thing,
Speaker 4: and even the last ones were like holy shit, that
Speaker 4: was like unprecedented. Yeah. Yeah, so I feel like it
Speaker 4: does almost feel like, oh, this thing that we talk
Speaker 4: about that will never happen, but like eventually it will,
Speaker 4: and who knows if it's five minutes from now or
Speaker 4: five hundred years from now. We really don't know.
Speaker 3: You need to ask it for more details.
Speaker 4: I gotta I gotta get into like getting a psychic
Speaker 4: on board or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I just recently started pulling tarot cards.
Speaker 4: Card about this.
Speaker 3: I don't have any decks here. Oh, but where are you?
Speaker 6: I don't know, it's I've go I started hanging out
Speaker 6: people who are like, you want to pull the tarot card,
Speaker 6: and so I guess it's a gateway drug.
Speaker 4: When's your birthday?
Speaker 3: I don't know the.
Speaker 6: Other ones though, bday I got I'm an orphan wave.
Speaker 6: I uh, I'm I'm Christmas Eve. Oh but so I'm
Speaker 6: a Capricorn. But I couldn't tell you my son's signs
Speaker 6: and moon sign.
Speaker 4: I was asking when your birthday is. I was going
Speaker 4: to say, I'll get you a because you're not supposed
Speaker 4: to buy your own tarot deck. You're supposed to have
Speaker 4: it gifted to you. Interesting, but that seems too far away.
Speaker 4: I probably will just you'll forget that, Yeah, you'll forget
Speaker 4: Oh No, I just am bad at keeping.
Speaker 5: I have to, but I've never opened them before because
Speaker 5: I've been too scared.
Speaker 3: I don't want anything stupid though, I don't want like
Speaker 3: a Pokemon Saturn.
Speaker 4: I won't do it.
Speaker 3: I will keep it classic, Okay, thank you, keep it classy.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna go seven tunami because it is terrifying, but
Speaker 4: also you can't avoid it easily by not living on
Speaker 4: the coast. Interesting because if you get hit on vacation,
Speaker 4: how are you gonna get fired on your day off?
Speaker 4: You know what I mean? Like you that's just like
Speaker 4: God really was like that one in particular, you're out
Speaker 4: of here. But like, if you live on the coast,
Speaker 4: obviously you're you're playing.
Speaker 2: Also, with the exception of again a nearly world endingly
Speaker 2: devastating earthquake and wave, the chances unless you live directly
Speaker 2: on the coast, the chances of it coming even a
Speaker 2: mile or two inland is I didn't know that pretty
Speaker 2: pretty unlike pretty rare.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that's what I'm saying. I'm gonna give it
Speaker 4: a seven because I do live less than a mile
Speaker 4: from the beach, and I will always take that risk
Speaker 4: as somebody who just needs to live by the beach.
Speaker 4: But I do understand, like, if it's something that you're
Speaker 4: genuinely terrified of, you can just live in Lakewood, you know.
Speaker 2: I think that's a pretty good number, Amanda.
Speaker 5: So it's just a classic one through ten.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, ten is the scariest bucket a piston.
Speaker 7: Shit, I'm gonna go nine point five.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, I like that. I like it way
Speaker 3: up there.
Speaker 5: Now that I know that it pushes from the bottom
Speaker 5: and that's how it destroys everything, it's way scarier to me.
Speaker 5: I thought, so I thought I could just like duck.
Speaker 4: Under No, but you've never even done that with a
Speaker 4: regular way.
Speaker 3: Now, all of a sudden, you need to be most.
Speaker 4: Just talked about this on the podcast I was a kid.
Speaker 4: I said, you've never experienced diving under a wave? And
Speaker 4: you said, and I never will.
Speaker 5: Well, like a small wave, like a teeny tiny little
Speaker 5: guy that you like pop over when you're like.
Speaker 3: In the water, A little short can't not like a.
Speaker 5: Big guy, not like something I'm gonna surf. I'm not
Speaker 5: going under that.
Speaker 4: Okay, Yeah, Because I do like open water swimming and
Speaker 4: stuff that's like fifteen feet to get out to where
Speaker 4: it's like enjoyable to actually swim. You have to get
Speaker 4: past the surf.
Speaker 3: It's not enjoyable sooner.
Speaker 2: No, No, it's usually waves.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, and if you want to actually swim, like
Speaker 4: I'm talking, goggles on, we're.
Speaker 3: Going I have, I have at all.
Speaker 7: I have never dove under a wave.
Speaker 3: Can handle it? No, No, we couldn't. I had a
Speaker 3: racist peanut butter cup during this recording.
Speaker 7: I have never dove under a wave.
Speaker 5: When my when I can't touch the bottom of the ocean,
Speaker 5: oh wow, Okay.
Speaker 4: That's when you need to do it. Yeah, like when
Speaker 4: I'm just say as you just kind of do like
Speaker 4: one of those yeah, you.
Speaker 5: Know when you're doing that. I dove under those Okay,
Speaker 5: and I'm like, whoa, that's crazy. Sure, but that's about it.
Speaker 5: And I'm terrified at the ocean also, so and I'm
Speaker 5: terrified of earthquakes, terrified of the ocean. I'm just terrified
Speaker 5: of death in general. So all those things are kind
Speaker 5: of in a tsunami. So that scares me.
Speaker 6: Yeah, tsunami is those are three ingredients in the tsunami cakes.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that scares me.
Speaker 3: Shit man, all.
Speaker 2: Right, So you have a seven to nine point five
Speaker 2: ed you.
Speaker 6: Go six really because it dragged me out of bed,
Speaker 6: but I now learned that I was too far away
Speaker 6: to be in danger, so I had to lower it.
Speaker 3: So that morning it was a nine point five. Now
Speaker 3: it's a six.
Speaker 5: Okay, Well, are we okay?
Speaker 3: Because I'm not going to move any closer to the water.
Speaker 5: I just feel like, can we change the fear though
Speaker 5: based on like, let's say you're at the beach.
Speaker 3: Oh, you're going to be five.
Speaker 5: The beach and you see the fucking waves coming, that's
Speaker 5: a ten.
Speaker 2: To be fair, we do face this question at the
Speaker 2: end of nearly every episode. We're like, well, if the
Speaker 2: clown is in my house, that's a ten. Guessing I
Speaker 2: don't know, so okay, uh seven, nine point five six.
Speaker 2: I feel like I have to go, like I have
Speaker 2: anxiety about it, but I feel like I have to
Speaker 2: go lower than you because.
Speaker 3: Because we're not by the beach.
Speaker 2: No, well, because you fled and the time and you
Speaker 2: didn't know fifteen minutes I thought I was fucked. I
Speaker 2: didn't go anywhere.
Speaker 5: But also a six made you flee.
Speaker 6: No, no, no, I said. On that day, it was
Speaker 6: like a nine point five. I learned, and now I've
Speaker 6: learned that was an irrational reaction to it. And now
Speaker 6: I'm lowering to a six, which is to say, above
Speaker 6: a five because might find a big fucking wave.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say I gave it a seven because
Speaker 4: I live closer to the beach.
Speaker 3: And also saying I should go lower.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm just saying, yeah, like, you don't need to manage.
Speaker 3: You don't see anybody, no I do. This is your
Speaker 3: decision so bad.
Speaker 4: Like we were talking about in the beginning, this is
Speaker 4: a reoccurring nightmare that I do have of standing on
Speaker 4: a beach and watching the water receipt and knowing there's
Speaker 4: nothing I can do. Like, so I'm saying this is
Speaker 4: clearly something I think about in that I fear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, I'm I should maybe go lower, but
Speaker 3: I'm sticking with it.
Speaker 5: But I think that's what makes it so much scarier
Speaker 5: is that once it's happening, you're done right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's nothing It's like getting necrotizing fascy iteas you
Speaker 4: have to be like.
Speaker 3: That was a hell of an episode. That much was
Speaker 3: not an easy episode to get through.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, then I guess you bring up the
Speaker 2: good point about the nightmares that I also have, So
Speaker 2: I feel like I get. I guess I'll go.
Speaker 3: Seven as well. I guess I'll go seven as well.
Speaker 3: I'm sticking with my six.
Speaker 4: I know, I think that that's fair. I think even
Speaker 4: like I.
Speaker 3: Was, six is a healthy fear of it.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I was expecting like a four from you.
Speaker 3: A lot of people say that, but yeah, that's in all.
Speaker 5: Fairness though, Like, I don't think there would be many
Speaker 5: things you could tell me on this podcast that wouldn't
Speaker 5: be close to an eight or and I.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say for me, you are scared of them.
Speaker 5: I'm scared of a lot.
Speaker 4: She's scared all of the literal perfect.
Speaker 3: You are the perfect guest for this show.
Speaker 5: Can't cut that, you can't cut that?
Speaker 3: All right?
Speaker 2: Well, guys, this has been an insane journey, very funny,
Speaker 2: lovely time with Cassidy, Amanda. Thank you, guys ky so
Speaker 2: much for coming on the show.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having us so much.
Speaker 2: The podcast again is drinking the kool aid. Go check
Speaker 2: them out right now, throw them on the Spotify follow list,
Speaker 2: like subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time,
Speaker 2: the show is I'm Chris Calari and I remain ed
Speaker 2: and the show is scared all the Time.
Speaker 3: We'll see you later. Bye bye, bye bye bye. Scared
Speaker 3: all the Time is co produced by Chris Calari and.
Speaker 2: Edvacola, written by Chris Calari.
Speaker 3: Edited by Edvacola.
Speaker 2: Additional support and Keeper of Sanity is test Fightful.
Speaker 3: Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stu
Speaker 3: and Mister Disclaimer is and just.
Speaker 6: A reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon.
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Speaker 3: Don't worry, Full Steady Can's welcome.
Speaker 1: No part of the show can be reproduced anywhere without
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Speaker 3: Legends Production Night. We are in this together, Together, Together,