Stuff You Should Know - How Tsunamis Work

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

Tsunamis are amazingly devastating natural disasters. They're miles tall and wide, travel as fast as a commercial airliner and can wipe out entire coastal towns. And if the last couple decades are any indication, they seem to be getting worse. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Salt Lake City, Utah, and Phoenix, Arizona. We're coming to see you. Yes, we are, so come see us. Why don't ya? Yeah, we put out the call to Salt Lake City

and said, should we come there? And tickets are going gangbusters. You guys really responded. Yeah, we thought you were just like, this is all just a joke, but no, it's turning out quite well. We're gonna be there October 23rd at the Grand Theater in Salt Lake City.

And then the next night will be in Phoenix at the Van Buren. And we can't wait to see you guys, so please come out and see us. And if you want tickets, you can go to sysklive.com for those, and Chuck, and. Yes, to our friends down under. Melbourne, boy, we are super psyched

because you love us and you sold us out very quickly. So we have added a second show that I believe is actually an earlier show, isn't that right? Yeah, it's a 530 show, I believe, at Melbourne is the one that we added, and it's gonna be cool. It's gonna be like a sweet little matinee.

Yeah, we call that happy hour in our country. Yeah, that's right. So make sure you guys bring a slab each. That's right, and Perth and Brisbane, step it up. Yeah, that's right. So if you wanna come see us, go to sysklive, whether you're in the US, whether you're in Australia, whether you're in New Zealand, it doesn't matter.

You can go to the same site and hang out with us, and there you go. See you guys soon. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.

Tristan's reign of terror is over. Yeah, Jerry had him killed. Yeah, he shouldn't have tried to take her place. I mean, he got what he deserved. Now there's just a grease spot on the carpet. Yeah, it was gross. He didn't have to leave him there for a week, Jerry. I thought that was a little weird also

to bring in a acid bath into the studio. Right, well, it made sense once she dissolved him in acid. Can I say something? Yes. The two that we're recording today, I feel like are such kind of classic core stuff you should know-y things. I know what you're gonna say.

That I'm surprised we haven't done them yet. I searched probably three times. Me too. Maybe five, Chuck. For Tsunamis? Yes, we've gone over this stuff before, and I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. The closest I could come possibly was Rogue Waves.

Yeah, for sure. Or how nuclear meltdowns work when we talk specifically about the Fukushima incident. Yeah, I think that had to be what it is because I'm still a little paranoid that we've covered this before. Yeah, I am too. So we're paranoid together.

Yay. But we'll fail together if we re-record an episode that we have done before, just couldn't find. But it's okay. We'll be all right. Right, everybody? Right. All right.

So we're doing... Those are both of our listeners. Yeah, Chuck and Buck. Wow. I know. Isn't that random that one of our two listeners is also named Chuck? Did you see that movie?

No. You know that was a movie, right? No. Yeah, it was a movie called Chuck and Buck. Was it a porno? Not exactly. Well, what was it about? It was, you know, Mike White, right?

No. You'd recognize him. He's an actor and a writer, one of my favorite writers in Hollywood. Okay. And it was his first little indie film, starring him and one of the brothers, one of the filmmaking brothers, the Weiss brothers.

Man, you are not talking my language right now. Yeah, anyway, it was him. And he played sort of a creepy guy that had a unhealthy crush on this other guy. And it got made for some very uncomfortable circumstances. You're talking about, I now pronounce you Chuck and Larry. I know the movie you're talking about.

I never saw that one either though. Oh, good. Hey, speaking of, dude, I saw Norm MacDonald stand up. I saw him at scene that one. It's Hitler's dog. Is it great? Yes.

Man, he's the best. Probably the best stand up on Netflix right now. I've been meaning to watch it and he's just a treasure. He's at his peak, it's great. I don't wanna talk it up too much. Just go in there fresh. It's just good Norm MacDonald stand up. You don't wanna talk it up too much

other than saying that it's the best thing on Netflix. Yeah, I'm actually downplaying it right now. That's how good it is. Yeah, I gotta check that out. All right, so back to it. We actually started off talking about tsunamis and then we veered off. We're right back in it.

Now we're back in it. So we'll talk about some of the more famous tsunamis. Like they've definitely been in the public consciousness over the last, in this millennium so far. Just because there've been two colossally huge ones that cause so much destruction, which is ironic because we're finally now getting to the point where we can warn people early about a tsunami

and yet two of the worst tsunamis in history, whether it's through the human toll or the financial toll occurred within eight years of each other within the last 20 years. It's kind of surprising what you know a little more about tsunamis. Yeah, so, and I found our own article to be pretty good actually.

Well, it was written by three people for goodness sake. How can that go wrong? Including Robert Lam. Well, I'll always stand up for that guy's writing. For sure. So tsunami is, we should just discover the word first of all. It is Japanese word obviously. And the TSU of tsunami means harbor

and the N-A-M-I means waves. And that is what a tsunami is. It is a series of waves generally or a wave. Although we will clear up, it's not exactly what you might think from Hollywood movies. No, it's really, really, really not. Yeah, but it's in the ocean obviously. And these things can be as high as 100 feet and get this.

They can travel up to, and in fact, the 2004 tsunami traveled about 300 miles per hour. Yes. And that is not at land, but through the ocean, 300 miles an hour. Yeah, and I've actually seen them that they're clocked at 600 miles per hour. Man, can you imagine?

No, I really can't. And I also have trouble with the math itself. Like there's some weird formula for calculating how fast a tsunami is traveling. But it's a square root of the G-force. You just lost me. Times, I know, times the depth of the ocean where the tsunami originated.

Boy. That's, I don't understand how that equals, how fast the tsunami is traveling. So I'm just gonna take it for their word that they can get up to 600 miles an hour. Yeah. That's crazy. So all right, let's talk about tsunami.

So a tsunami is what most people think of as a giant wave. It's not necessarily what you're thinking of, like you said, Chuck, but it is a wave in some way, shape, or form. And it follows a lot of the, it has a lot of the same traits or characteristics of a wave that you see like on the surface of the ocean. When you're sitting there on the beach

and the waves are rolling in, technically that's the same family. That's the little brother of a tsunami. And so any kind of wave has a couple of components to it. It has the trough, which is the lowest point. It has the crest, which is the highest point. And happiest point generally. Yeah, typically that's where the surfers like to hang out.

Yeah. You measure them from the height of the crest to the trough. That's the wave height, right? And then the distance between the crest of one wave and the crest of another is one wavelength. So it's weird to think of, because you think of the wave as just like, you know, the part that's kind of curving up out of the ocean

that you see in like graphic design or something like that, right? Yeah. The wave is actually much bigger than that. It goes from the front, the top of the crest, all the way forward, and includes the back of the wave in front of it technically. That's one wave.

Yeah. And it includes the trough and the crest. So bam, that's a wave, whether it's a tidal wave or an ocean surface wave. Right. And then the frequency, which is what you would call the wave period, is it the time for two waves in a row

to hit the same point? Yeah. So if you like had a buoy and a wave went past and then another wave went past, the time between, that's the wave period, right? Yeah. Or if you were a buoy. Sure.

We should maybe do one on, I don't know if it's big enough for a full episode, but undertow would be kind of interesting to cover at some point. I'm surprised we haven't done that one either. Yeah. That's, last time I was at Charleston, day two and three were fine,

but that first day was an incredible undertow. And they even talked about it on the news. It was pretty dangerous. Yeah, so were you in the water? Oh yeah, I was having fun, but it's one of those things where you're playing in the water and you look up. It's like, wow, Emily's a mile away now.

Yeah, that's very dangerous. It was really carrying me down the beach. And the skin has been peeled off of your ankles and calves. Well, yeah, you're just fighting through it. Right. Until you eventually say, I'm 47 years old, what the heck am I doing? I'm gonna go lay down.

Right. With a gin and tonic. Right. So you got it figured out, Chuck, you know that? Yeah, I think I have my moments. So when we're talking about waves on an ocean, back to waves, by the way. Yes.

When you're talking about waves on an ocean, like the waves people normally think of, those are actually generated by wind. And we definitely talked about this somewhere before. Yeah, it's pretty interesting because I think most people think of gravitational pull and things like that, atmospheric pressure, and they contribute,

but wind is kind of the most common way that a wave will form. Right, and it does so by basically on a molecular level, and this article really goes into granular detail, but basically air molecules push water molecules along and create these circular patterns. Not circular on top of the surface, but if you're looking at like a cross section of the water,

circular from the top into the water, usually down about a meter underwater, and they can get higher and higher as the wind gets stronger and stronger, right? Yeah, and these little guys are known as capillary waves, which is the cutest wave, I guess. Sure. And then they just keep circling around vertically,

like you said, until eventually it sort of dissipates the deeper it goes, obviously. It does, but so depending on how strong the wind is, when that wave starts to whip up and froth up and get like the back to it, right? Yeah. It has more surface for the wind to press on, so the wind now can push it along even further,

so it can pick up height, speed, velocity, all that jam, and it can get kind of big and they can get kind of fast, but the point is this, what you're seeing is not water being pushed along. What you're seeing is the transfer of kinetic energy from the wind into water, and what a wave is the movement of that energy through water. Yeah, it's an important distinction, I think.

It really is, because if you are at one point and you see a wave and you touch it, and you somehow scramble forward and catch it when it's like 50 yards down or towards shore, you touch it again, you're actually touching two different bits of water. It's not the same water moving from point A to point B, it's the energy moving through it,

and it is, it's a bit of a brain buster if you start to overthink it, but it's also extraordinarily simple if you don't. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so that's a wave, okay? That's a surface wave. Tsunamis are not like that. No, and if you wanna understand how a tsunami has formed,

and I think we talked about this in earthquakes as well, which is why it all rings so familiar, but that is, not always, but that is generally what kicks off in the case of the most two recent devastating ones. What kicks off a tsunami will be an underwater earthquake, and those happen, if you took out all the ocean's water, you would really just need to think of the seafloor

just like you would the rest of the hard stuff on the earth. Yeah, well put. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, no, I do. It's like if you're on a mountain and you come to a valley, it's the same thing that's just underwater. Yeah, so like this is where we talk about plate tectonics. We have these huge plates, a series of them,

that make up what's called the lithosphere, and that is the top layer of the earth, and they make up everything that you see, including what's underwater. And they float on top of the stenosphere. Do you think I said that correctly? I think so, and I remember talking about this is sort of a, is that the lube?

Yeah, the hot magma lube. Gross. So because it's not exactly lube, but it's almost like hot-ass fault more. You know what I'm saying? Sure. It's a solid, but it's a very viscous solid, right? Yeah.

And so those plates float on top of the stenosphere, and there are boundaries between the plates, and where those boundaries connect, all sorts of things can happen, right? Yeah, man. You can have one plate going upward while the other plate's going downwards, so they're sliding alongside each other.

You can have one, you can have them pushing up into one another, and you have mountain ranges. Sure. Then you can have ones where one slips under another one, and that creates ocean trenches when it's underwater. But you have to think about this. This isn't happening quickly.

This happens at the rate of about an inch, about two and a half centimeters per year. That's how slowly these things are moving when they're interacting with one another. Yeah, but they're huge, and it's a lot of force, even though it's going slow. So what you were talking about is subduction, and sometimes in cases of subduction,

you can have a lighter plate that just sort of snaps upward when they meet each other, and they say hi, lighter plate snaps up, and that's what causes the earthquake, and a tremendous amount of rock and force shoot directly upward from the floor of the ocean. Right, so now a tsunami has just been born, because that's what it is, right?

With a normal wave, you've got wind blowing the water, or wind blowing through the water. You have, with a tsunami, this huge release of energy upward through the water column toward the surface, and this energy's like, yeah, we're going up, and right when it hits the surface, it really comes in contact with gravity

that says, no, you're not, and they go, yeah, okay, we're going outward then. It spreads outward, and this article gives a great analogy, because it really drives home what we're dealing with here. If you take a pebble, and you throw it into a pond, it makes that ripple, right? It's the same exact thing,

but rather than a rock going into the water, this is the force of an earthquake under the water going upward out. Right. And so that upward out movement, that is the tsunami waves that are being created, and it spreads outward in different ripples, just like if you throw a rock in the pond.

Should we take a break? I think we should, I'm getting kind of worked up. No, I love it. It's the Earth Sciences, man, that's your jam. Yeah, yeah, that's true. All right, so we're going to come back, and we're going to talk about the speed of a tsunami and how that happens right after this.

On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, we're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? Also leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1- Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so

we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so when we left off, I promised talk of tsunami speed and this is where it gets a little like, this is where like if you've learned it from movies, then you've probably learned the wrong thing because the tsunami moves the fastest in deep water. So when a tsunami is going 300 miles an hour and you're, of course, you're monitoring things which we'll talk about with all sorts of advanced equipment, but if you're just looking with

your naked eye and a tsunami is going at 300 miles an hour through the ocean, you might see like a three foot high rise, if that on the surface of the ocean where you, where things really take action is when it gets close to shore because it really slows down and it gets a lot taller because it's shallower water. Right. Like the shelf, the coastal shelf that gets shallower and shallower pushes it upward. Yeah. So it slows and grows taller, right?

Yeah, depending on the topography of what's going on, wherever this tsunami is reaching shore, it's going to have a big difference, of course, but the point is, is it's compressing all this energy upward as it gets closer and it slows down. And it's like, it's very difficult to grasp how enormous these tsunami waves are, especially considering that like three feet, like a meter maybe of surface water will be disturbed to look like a wave, like a normal wave, right? But that wave goes all the way down to the ocean floor, often miles. So you have basically what amounts to a three mile tall wave.

That's a tsunami rather than, you know, a wave that you see on the surface. That's maybe six feet tall and then it's disturbing water three feet under the water. This is a three mile tall wall of water moving out in a ripple formation in what's called the wave train. So successive waves like those ripples spreading out from that pebble that are three miles tall and many, many, many miles across just coming at you basically. Yeah. So if it had slowed down, you know, 30 to 40 miles an hour at land is still really fast.

Yeah. Obviously it's not 300, but, you know, right before the tsunami happens on land, it can be really creepy on shore. You're going to notice this beach water rising and falling in a odd ways and sometimes it will suck all that water out. And I believe that movie, The Impossible, didn't it show that? I don't know. I've seen that in a movie and it's really creepy looking and apparently that's, it is

actually very creepy looking in real life too. That's not like a movie thing. It can suck all that water out and it may not look like a movie wave coming in. It's more likely to look like just a huge flood coming your way. Right, right. Like a very fast moving tide, which is I think one reason people call them tidal waves even though the tides have nothing to do with it. And it doesn't look like that huge wave that you see in like the day after tomorrow or

something like that. It's like a very fast moving, fast rising floodwater and on this fast moving floodwater, you have like huge raging rivers on top of the water too. It's just this huge chaotic mass of water that is moving inland very quickly and within an enormous amount of destructive force. Yeah. And then once it gets there, depending on where it lands, you might have like areas that where you think are sheltered because of high dunes or you're in an inlet or a bay.

Sometimes they can act as like funnels. Like if the tsunami goes through there, you just don't know what kind of destructive power it's going to have until it interacts with the topography and the land features that it hits. No, but it does do some interesting stuff. So first of all, that one thing where the bay or the harbor, whatever gets the water sucked out of it, it's called drawback. And they've studied that and actually concluded what you're seeing is the trough of the wave.

That's the trough of the first tsunami wave. So if that's the part that reaches land first, the trough, that's going to have drawback. So it's not always going to have drawback, just only if the trough arrives first. The crest could arrive first and then all you're seeing is this floodwater coming out of nowhere, but there's also supposedly the sound of a freight train or a jet coming at you. So it's like a horrific sound too that's coming with this wall of water. But one of the other things I think you're about to talk about was wraparound effect.

Yeah. And that's along like a coastline when I sort of thought of it as like, or maybe it's harbor resonance. I'm not sure which is which, but when you have like a fish tank and you imagine just shaking it with all your force and it's just banging off of interior walls. Is that wraparound? No, that's harbor resonance. But that is, so you know when you're doing that, right?

Like it just picks up more and more force with each movement, each oscillation from one side to the other, right? And those poor fish. Imagine. I know they're like, please stop. The empty fish tank, everyone. Surely this is illegal. But imagine that happening in the harbor, like that's what happens in the harbor.

So it just gets even more destructive. But the wraparound effect, this article just totally completely gets it wrong. Yeah, I didn't quite get it. It's not the wraparound effect at all. So the wraparound effect is if you have a tsunami wave, remember these are many, many miles across and they're coming inland. If they encounter say like a barrier island, just a little island, right? You would think that the barrier island would slow it down, maybe make it take it a little

easier on the land, the shoreline behind the barrier island. It doesn't do that at all. The barrier island actually amplifies the tsunami wave and they couldn't figure out how, but they knew that it could amplify it by like 70%. But it doesn't make any sense. So they started studying it and I'm not sure who, so I'm just going to call them they for now. But they figured out what happens is the tsunami wave is split into two by this island.

And for a very brief time, when they come back together, they are basically doubled in force. It's like two waves together now with this force and it amplifies it onto the land behind it and makes it way worse. That kind of makes sense if I picture it in my head. Well, they actually do have cool pictures of it too, I think on a NOAA site. So look up like wraparound effects tsunamis and it shows like just part one, two, three, four and all these, I think six pictures and it really drives it home.

But I mean, it definitely does make sense, but it also intuitively doesn't at all. Yeah. And obviously they've been in the news in the last like 10 or 15 years, like you said. And the devastation that can happen from a tsunami is just, it's immense because people live along coastlines and we'll get to early warning later, but no matter what kind of early warning you have, you may can get some people out of there, but it's going to wreck everything in its path. And that happened very famously recently a couple of times in December 26, 2004 in the

Indian Ocean. There was a massive 9.1 magnitude earthquake that apparently it shook buildings 1200 miles away in Thailand. Yeah. That's a big one. And they always, you know, the, I guess the big Mac version of earthquakes is Hiroshima bombs. Right.

The magnitude of 23,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Yeah. No small earthquake. No, not at all. I think the next most recent one was in 1960. The next biggest one was in 1960 and it was like a 9.4 to 9.6 and this is a 9.1. So it was no slouch as far as earthquakes go. But the thing about this, the 2004 earthquake that hit Sumatra, it was one of the deadliest

natural disasters in human history. Yeah. It killed like about 230,000 people and ruined, no, I can't. Like if you go through the list of like deadly tsunamis over history, I mean the next largest I saw was one in Japan in, I think, yeah, the 19th century that killed 26,000 people. So a 10th of the 2004 tsunami. And the reason why it was so deadly was it hit 11 different countries that were fully engorged with tourists on the holiday season.

So there were a lot of people there, including a lot of people who had never really been introduced to tsunami preparedness or knew what was going on. If there was drawback, and I think there may have been actually, I think I saw a footage of the drawback for that one, so you're right. People were kind of like going out into the harbor like, what's this? And when that happens, when the drawback happens and you're seeing the trough of that first tsunami wave, you have seconds, maybe minutes to get away, not go closer to it. Yeah, but it wouldn't have made a difference in that case.

Probably not. It hit and it was enormous and huge and yeah, it just killed a lot of people very quickly. Because even if you do have the time to do it, you have to get no less than a mile inland or no less than 100 feet above sea level and you have a very short time to do that. So my friend Dave Barnhart, who listens to the show, hey Dave. He is a documentary filmmaker for nonprofits and he went down there and did a series of documentary updates over the years. I can't remember how many people, but he followed specifically the lives and aftermath of several

different individuals and families and went down there himself and shot the stuff. I believe in Indonesia and I don't know if he's still following up, but he did it for many years and I saw a lot of this stuff and he won some awards for it. It's just unbelievable the stories of devastation and then perseverance for some of these people that started over with nothing in the worst, most unsanitary, devastating conditions you can imagine living in. Yeah, I was going to say I can't imagine, I can't imagine. Yeah, I mean it's just heartbreaking to see this stuff.

Quarter of a million people, it's hard to even fathom. There's this one story Yumi got obsessed with at the time about a kid named Baby81. He was like the 81st baby to be brought into I think a hospital in Sri Lanka or something afterward and there was this huge media publicity circus around who's kid it was. Supposedly they're reporting that there was like nine different families claiming him and there was a huge battle over it when really it was just this one poor family who knew that it was their son and who went to go make a claim, but they actually got arrested for trying to take the baby out of the hospital and had to wait like a month before they got

him back through like a DNA test, but it's just like, first of all, tsunami, secondly their baby gets swept away out of the mom's arms in the tsunami and then when they finally find out the baby's alive, they go to take him back and they can't and just like the idea that they have to prove that it's their son, it just kept getting worse and worse and worse and apparently they had to move because they were known as the tsunami family. Oh man. Here's the last little bit for you. They went and appeared on Good Morning America in the United States and told their story.

When they got back, they were denied disaster aid because everyone assumed that they had been paid for their appearance and that they didn't need the money even though they hadn't been paid for it. Wow. Isn't that awful? Yeah. One family that happened to all of that. The story of the movie The Impossible is a true story and an amazing story and just

a tough movie to watch, you know? Yeah. So I was thinking back, like I saw that within the last like year or so I think and I was thinking back to like some of those scenes and now that I'm thinking about it, I'm like, how did they even shoot that stuff? Like how? It doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

Like did they flood a town somewhere and start filming and put the actors in there? Because that's what it looks like for sure. It was pretty remarkable what they did like cinematically for sure. But you're absolutely right. It's very tough to watch for sure. So that was 2004. And then just seven or eight years ago in 2011 in March, and we definitely talked about this in the nuclear meltdown.

But the tsunami that hit Japan, this one had a horrific effect in and of itself just from the tsunami. I don't know what the final death toll, but it was well over four or 5,000 I think. I think the official death toll is now at 20,000 dead. Oh, wow. Because I knew for a while there were just people missing, man. I think they finally combined them all and just said 20,000 is the official death toll. The damage is upwards of 309 billion US dollars.

It's the most expensive natural disaster in history. Well, yeah. And this one was noted not only for its devastation and for human life and money, but obviously the generator of the, how do you pronounce it? Fukushima? Daiichi. Daiichi nuclear facility. That was where it made, I don't know about the most news, but that's what really set

this one apart. You had a tsunami disable a nuclear reactor for a brief time, which is bad news. Yeah. It shut down like it should because I guess they had seismic detectors that like tripped an automatic like safeguard system. But the power got knocked out. So there wasn't any cooling system and it's not like it just goes from incredibly hot nuclear reaction to room temperature immediately.

You need to keep cooling it down and they didn't. And apparently from that meltdown, and I don't remember talking about this in the episode, this is insane, but the meltdown created radiation that tore apart the water vapor. That's amazing. And so the hydrogen separated and so the place filled with hydrogen gas and it started exploding and that's what blew a hole in the reactor and created the leak. I don't remember that. That's nuts.

I wonder if that was found out afterward and not available to us at the time. I'll bet you're right. That sounds like something that they, like I don't even know if at the time we recorded it, they knew how the breach occurred. Yeah. Because we did, we recorded within like a week or so of it happening. So that place is still, still like way hot. They send in robots now.

They're trying to figure out what robot to use and they haven't hit on it quite yet because the place melts robots that go in to try to clean up the mess. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Oof. All right. Well, we're going to take another break.

Talk a little bit about how we're getting better at predicting earthquakes and then also what it means for marine life right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia

starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Charles, we're back. I also want to say, oh, real quick before we do that, um, there are two, at least two

articles and I believe they're written by the same guy who went and covered the 2011, um, tsunami and the aftermath. One is called Ghosts of the Tsunami. It's called, it's, it's, I think in the London review books, it is amazing. It's about how these, these people in Japan, like live among ghosts as far as they're concerned, they see like ghosts everywhere of the, they're the people who died in the tsunami. It's one of the better articles I've ever read in my life. The other one is the school beneath the wave and that was in the Guardian and, um, it's,

it tells the tale of this one specific school that, um, this guy who covered the tsunami knew all these different stories and all these tales, um, that came out of it. And this one, I believe he says that he, um, put off writing about until last because it's so terrible because a whole school of children just got swept away by the tsunami because the grown-ups wouldn't listen to the kids who they'd trained to re, respond correctly to a tsunami and they just wouldn't listen to them and, and it just swept away basically as whole villages group of children. Would they have gotten out?

Yeah. If they'd listened to the kids, probably most of, if not all would have survived. Oh man. Yeah. It's, it's a tough one to read for sure, but both of them are definitely worth it. Uh, so when it comes to predicting these, um, obviously, and the same with earthquakes and tornadoes and any natural disaster, what they're trying to do is just get better and better about getting as much time beforehand as possible because, uh, then this article

very simply points out, like there's, you cannot stop it. There's nothing you can do. You can't build anything that can thwart or divert a tsunami. So the only chance that people have a survival is getting as early warning as possible to get as many people out of there as possible, will still destroy the towns and villages and cities, but, uh, at least you could save some human lives and, uh, unfortunately a lot of, I mean, it's getting much better, but a lot, most of the studying takes place afterward so you can try and get better about before.

Yeah. And one way that you study tsunamis is through things like, um, eyewitness reports. Yeah. You go, you go look to see how high the debris made it up to. Yeah. And how far it went. Yeah. Um, how wide it was.

Um, some of the debris will end up like on the other side of the world sometimes if the tsunami is big enough. Cause remember you, you hear about the tsunami where it hit, you know, the closest place, the place it devastated the most, whether it was Sumatra in 2004 or, um, Japan in 2011. But like that, say like the Japan one, it took, it carried stuff all the way over to California. Yeah. And in both directions, it's just California was way further away, so it didn't experience

the destruction like Japan did, which is right up on the place where it happened. Yeah. So, you know, equipment-wise they use, um, buoys out in the ocean, they use tide gauges. They have tide stations that measure just the smallest little changes in sea level. They do have, uh, seismograph stations that record, uh, you know, underwater earthquake activity, um, and anything apparently that's 7.5 or higher that is under the ocean, earthquake-wise is when an official tsunami watch is issued. Right.

So when the tsunami watch is issued, then you won't hear about it quite yet. They, that means that they start checking out their gauge stations and if the gauge station reports a tsunami, right? Yeah. Um, I think it's, I don't know if it's a, I guess it's a change in time. Tide is what the gauge station measures, right? Yeah. So if there's a sudden change in tide that doesn't coincide with the tidal schedules,

they'll say, yeah, that's a tsunami. Send out the alarm and then they alert every, like the public through text messages or TV or, you know, the Paul Revere, however they do it. How early can they, do you know how early they can get this stuff now? I, I saw minutes for the 2011 one, which, like, that's all, that's all. Yeah. In some cases, that's all you need. If you're in a tall building, you just keep going up.

No, that's true. That can help. Or if you are close enough, you're getting your car and start driving as far inland as you can. Minutes can help. And they actually think that the, the death toll would have been way higher in Japan had they not learned as much from the 2004 tsunami and set up emergency systems like they had, that the death toll would have been much worse.

It's just the reason why it got as high as 20,000 is because it was such a big tsunami. Like it topped like a hundred and almost 130 feet. Yeah. It was just enormous. That's, that's what accounted for the destructive force. Yeah. And the whole time I was researching this stuff, I didn't see anything in our article that talked about sea life because I was thinking, what's it like to be a fish when 300 mile

an hour tsunami rolls through? And it can be devastating. Like the base of the wave can completely change and rewrite the topography of the sea floor. Really bad erosion will happen. And what they call the benthic ecosystem, which is the, you know, the very sea bottom ecosystem with all the crustaceans and sea snails and worms and stuff. It can just wreck it. Coral reefs can be destroyed.

And in fact, in 2004, it completely wrecked the coral reefs around the Indian oceans coastlines. Sea grass, beds, mangrove forest, all these wetlands can be super vulnerable. And then species invasion, like you were saying, stuff can move thousands and thousands of miles. That happens with sea life too. Oh, wow. So you can get an algae, and in fact, they have recorded like algae and other organisms in like Oregon that came from Japan that have never been there before.

So sometimes that can be bad. Some, you know, sometimes it works out and they just say, all right, we'll set up camp here, but they can displace native species. So that's all a consideration and could not find anything specifically about literally in the water, like what happens to a whale that's... Yeah. ...that's swimming along and then 300 miles an hour comes through. Like does it just go kaboom and the whale explodes kind of thing?

Because I could kind of see that happening. I don't know. Or is it just like being in a washing machine for a minute and then the whale's like, what the heck was that all about? What a rush. It's weird. Who knows? Hopefully, hopefully, Chuck, let me...

We have some very, very sharp listeners who I'll bet some of which are marine biologists. Sure. So we want to hear from you guys. What happens to a whale that gets hit by a tsunami? And that's us asking from our eight-year-old hearts, and we're going to go play with our Tonka trucks now while we wait for the answer. Yeah. And of course, anything within the, you know, I'm not sure how much distance, but anything

close to the inland part will just be washed ashore. So I mean, millions and millions of bits of sea life are now deposited on dry land. Yeah. And we should say so for the unfortunate ones, I mean, if you're a fish and you're getting smacked around with this debris now, like you're getting run into a house that'll kill you, there's all sorts of obstacles that aren't out in the water that are now in your way because you're being pushed inland in this huge surge of floodwater. One of the other destructive forces of tsunamis is that they recede, and when they recede,

they take all that stuff back out with them, too. So maybe your house survived the initial inundation, but it's not necessarily going to survive all that debris being pulled on it as it's all pulled back outward into the ocean, too. They just go from bad to worse from moment to moment, basically. Well, and I think it slipped by, I don't think we mentioned, too, that it's not just that first wave, like you can get secondary flood pushes up to like an hour and a half later. Yes. Thank you.

So that whole wave train, right? You get the initial wave, and you get another one, or the initial floodwater, and then another one, another one. Yeah. I saw actually up to like a couple hours later, and people have died going back, thinking after the flood. Well, that's over. Right.

Exactly. They go back, and then it's like, nope. Here comes around, too. Geez. Yeah. I believe we haven't done this one before. We definitely haven't. I looked a bunch.

Yeah, I did, too. And I also tried every word combination I could think of, and nothing came up. I even tried spelling it S-O-O-N-A-M-I. That sounds like us, man. I got one more. You ready? Yeah. The tallest tsunami wave ever recorded was 1958 in Latuya Bay, Alaska.

It reached 520 meters, or 1,710 feet above sea level. Wow. Can you imagine? Yeah. I mean, that's like the tallest skyscrapers. It's up there for sure. Just coming at you. Yeah.

Well, if you want to know more about tsunamis, you can search that word. Don't spell it S-O-O-N-A-M-I. It's spelled T-S-U-N-A-M-I, I think. In the search bar at HouseToForks.com, and since I spelled some stuff, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this story from a nice lady from a strawberry farmer. How about that? Those are great stories.

Hey, guys. Stumbled upon your podcast and have become obsessed. My husband and I own a strawberry farm. Doesn't that sound lovely? It really does. What a nice way to live, you know? Man. And I recently started listening while I'm working outside.

The other day, I was walking in the fields and listening to an older one on cremation. I had a story. My mom's dad passed away in the early 90s when I was very young. In 2012, my grandma lost the family home in Long Island, New York to Hurricane Sandy. My grandma had an additional home in Florida and moved there. The following summer, my mom and dad drove out to New York to pack up what was left at the house before it was going to be demolished. My parents found this little wooden box with no labels.

My dad tried to open it and could not and unknown to my mom at the time. He put it in the van, drove it back home to Wisconsin. When my mom found it, she asked my grandma what it was and she replied, oh yeah, that's your father. I'm just trying to do my best Long Island accent. You did a great one. Needless to say, they were glad that they were unsuccessful in opening the box. My mom rightfully labeled the box and now we all get to see grandpa every time we visit

their home. Thanks for entertaining me while I walk up and down rows of strawberries, checking on plants and weeds, eight acres at a time by hand, mow the lawn or hand prune, 10 acres of strawberry plants. She's just rubbing it in now. PS, will you ever do a show in Milwaukee? Well, Danielle, Clark, we have done a show in Milwaukee and it was great. So I'm sure we'll come back at some point.

Yeah. Either there or Madison. Yeah, or maybe both because I think we found out like they don't actually drive down the road to one another. It's weird. It is weird. Well, if you have a great story about something we talked about, like Danielle, thanks by the way, Danielle.

If you want to let us know about it, you can tweet to us. We're all over Twitter. You can check us out on Facebook or on that too. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffychinau.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.