Underwater Landslide May Have Doubled 2011 Japanese Tsunami 27
sciencehabit writes An underwater landslide the size of the Paris may have triggered the worst of the tsunami that struck Japan on 11 March 2011, a new study claims. In the new study, researchers worked back from details of the ocean surface motion recorded by gauges along the Japanese shore on the day of the earthquake. Much as sound waves can help the ear pinpoint the source of a gunshot and whether a small pistol or a large cannon fired it, tsunami waves carry the imprint of the ocean floor disturbance that created them. The team concludes that during the earthquake a slab of sediment 20 km by 40 km and up to 2 km thick slid about 300 meters down the steep slope of Japan Trench, 'acting like a piston.'
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LoC is a unit of volume or knowledge. Area is football fields [naturally, real football as played in the US, not that pansy ball kicking thing in Europe].
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I don't see how.. The Manhattan theatre holds only 581 seats with a single screen. I fail to see how a landslide that `big` would register anywhere!
I wonder what else Tim was trying to relate to... hmm...
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They meant this dude: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
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His piston is not that big
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It's not about the size of the boat, but the motion in the ocean!
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Oh, the article should have clarified that the slab was as thick as the height of 6 Eiffel Towers, and it slid approximately 1 Eiffel Tower in distance.
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Can we convet that to barn megaparsecs (something Google conversions can handle)?
1 Paris (Score:2)
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Woah (Score:3)
When I first read the headline ti came out as "underwear landslide" not a pretty picture.
Unfortunate, but not uncommon (Score:2)
Underwater earthquakes often, perhaps even usually, set off huge underwater landslides. Sometimes the tsunami from the landslide is worse than that from the quake. Quite often they will reinforce each other, at least in some directions.
So in this case it sounds like a huge earthquake acted in a normal way, but with an unfortunate direction of reinforcement. It also sounds as if it could have been a lot worse. The landslide was not huge as such things go. IIUC the one in Indonesia a year or so earlier h
But what was the size in (Score:1)
Landslides the size of Paris (Score:2)