Tsunami Meets Port City = Oblivion

By Darryl Mason

As a kid, I can't recall ever seeing actual photos of a tsunami ploughing into a city. If there was film footage of such an event, it was never shown on any TV I saw, and it's the sort of thing I would have been looking for. About all we saw of tsunamis were the ones featured in 1960s disaster movies, and most of those were caused by Godzilla and his friends.

There were encyclopedia entries on tsunamis, and the occasional book to be found in libraries on the subject, but mostly it was left to your own imagination to visualise waves 5, 10 or 20 metres high slamming into a city.

We've seen footage in the past decade of tsunamis, captured on video & cell phone cameras, particularly the 2004 Asian tsunami, with those horrific clips of sea water sweeping through exotic resorts. And we've seen the devastation that tsunamis can cause portrayed, often astoundingly so, through CGI special effects in movies like The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 and Deep Impact.

But none of it compares to footage like this from the 2011 Japan tsunami, where you can see the Japanese port city of Kesennuma utterly destroyed in less than five minutes, entire neighbourhoods smashed, broken and carried away :



Where once there was a modern, vibrant Japanese port city, there is now only death and devastation.



Has anybody who lives near the coast and has seen footage like that above not felt a sickening unease about just how vulnerable to such a disaster every coastal town and city in the world just might be?

Some more than others, obviously.

But tsunamis are not caused solely by earthquakes. Underwater landslides, massive landslides into a sea on the other side of the planet, and asteroids slamming into oceans are all believed to have caused ancient mega-tsunamis, bigger than any that have hit human civilization's villages, towns and cities in the past 10,000 years.

Tsunamis once seemed such a distant threat, something from history, from fables, from science fiction movies. Not anymore. As the swaying skyscrapers of Tokyo have shown, you can protect a city's buildings from even a 9.1 magnitude earthquake, but the biggest sea walls cannot hold back a tsunami of 10 or 20 metres high.

What the earthquake cannot shake down, the tsunami can wipe away, almost effortlessly.