No, not the one that just killed more than 50,000 people in South-East Asia. But here's a 1999 article that explains why our own western seaboard is hardly immune from walls of water moving at up to 500 mph — almost the speed of a jet airliner. Granted, the photo illustration is perhaps a bit too James Cameron, but the article itself, by Krista Conger, seems level-headed enough.
>> The Monterey Bay Canyon, less than a mile off the shore of Moss Landing between Santa Cruz and Monterey, has sides sloping sharply down nearly two miles. Such steep drop-offs create ample opportunities for underwater landslides. Additionally, Monterey Bay itself is bisected by two faults, the Monterey Bay fault and the San Gregorio fault. In 1998, the California Division of Mines and Geology upgraded the San Gregorio to a Class A fault after comparing seismographic history in the region with recent movements detected along the fault line. The upgrade underscores the potential of the fault to rupture and cause an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 or greater. <<
And there's another tectonic threat that has U.S. seismologists worried.
>> Less than 200 miles off the shore of Washington and Oregon lies the largest active fault outside of Alaska, the Cascadia subduction zone. Stretching about 1,000 miles from Eureka, California, to Vancouver Island in Canada, it is exactly the kind of fault scientists expect to cause a tsunami. Scientists estimate that a wave generated from a Cascadia rupture would reach the shore within 20 minutes. Bruce Jaffe, a seismologist with the U.S.G.S., believes he has found evidence of a huge tsunami which devastated the northwest coast of the United States 300 years ago, as a result of a rupture in the Cascadia fault. <<
Scientists believe that the ruptures occur in 400- to 500-year cycles. So,
>> ...the danger to Washington, Oregon, and California has been building for the past 300 years. Evidence suggests that when the stress on the fault is finally released it could trigger an earthquake of magnitude 8 or 9. <<
That's a stunning sledgehammer of a quake. The big one that hit close to Sumatra today, sending giant waves crashing into Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka, among other places, measured 8.9, making it the world's worst in four decades.
Of course, daredevils with a death wish aren't panicking — they're keeping their surf boards ready. Officials in Hawaii are still a bit freaked out by the memory of 400-plus surf enthusiasts showing up on the beaches of Oahu ten years ago, trying to catch a killer wave. To prevent a repeat, a public-safety DVD has been distributed through Hawaiian surf shops this fall. The message is sure to get lost on this guy.
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