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The Wave That Was Taller Than a Skyscraper — Transcript

by The Last Day · 1,709 words · 310 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:02On a July night in 1958, [music] three
0:05fishing boats sat anchored in a quiet
0:07bay in Alaska.
0:09The water was calm. The sky was clear.
0:12It was the kind of night that fishermen
0:14live for. Two of the crews had already
0:17gone to bed.
0:19On one of the boats, a man named Howard
0:21Ulrich was asleep [music] in the cabin
0:24with his 7-year-old son.
0:26At around 10:00 in the evening, the dog
0:29started barking. Ulrich got up. And what
0:32he saw in the next few minutes should
0:34not have been possible.
0:37What he saw would go down in scientific
0:39history as the largest wave ever
0:42recorded on this planet.
0:44Not 30 m, not 50.
0:47More than 500 m tall. Over 1,700 ft.
0:54A wall of water higher than the Empire
0:57State Building.
0:58Higher than almost every skyscraper
1:00humans have ever built. Rising out of a
1:03peaceful Alaskan bay and coming [music]
1:05straight toward him.
1:07He had a wife and child on board.
1:10[music] An anchor chain holding him in
1:12place.
1:13And less than 3 minutes to decide what
1:16to do.
1:17This is the story of the largest [music]
1:19wave in recorded history. Why it
1:22happened and how anyone [music] survived
1:24it at all.
1:26To understand the wave, you first have
1:29to understand the bay. It is called
1:31Lituya Bay and it sits on the coast of
1:34Southeast [music] Alaska.
1:36From above, it looks like a giant letter
1:39T carved into the wilderness. A long
1:42narrow inlet [music] about 11 km deep
1:45with a tiny entrance to the open ocean
1:48at one end and steep mountain walls
1:51rising thousands of meters on either
1:53side.
1:55It is stunningly beautiful.
1:57It is also one of the most dangerous
1:59pieces [music] of geography on Earth,
2:02and the local Tlingit people knew it
2:04long before any [music] scientist did.
2:07Their oral traditions spoke of the bay
2:10with fear. Stories described a spirit
2:13that [music] lived in the water and
2:15shook the bay, destroying canoes and
2:18drowning [music] those who entered.
2:20For generations, people avoided it.
2:23That fear was not superstition. [music]
2:26It was memory. It was a warning system
2:29encoded in story, passed down from the
2:31last time the bay had done what it was
2:34about to do again.
2:36Because this had happened before.
2:39The bay had shown its trees.
2:42Along the slopes, scientists later found
2:45trim lines, clear boundaries where old
2:48forest stopped and younger forest
2:50[music] began, marking where previous
2:53waves had stripped the mountainsides
2:55bare.
2:57Lituya Bay had a history.
3:00Nobody in 1958 fully understood it.
3:03And there is one more detail that makes
3:05this place uniquely lethal.
3:08Running directly underneath it, along
3:11the length of the bay, is one of the
3:13most active fault lines in North
3:15America, the Fairweather Fault,
3:18a tear in the crust of the Earth where
3:20two enormous tectonic plates grind past
3:24each other.
3:25A narrow, steep-walled bay, mountains of
3:29loose rock and ice standing thousands of
3:32meters above the water,
3:34and a major fault running right through
3:37the middle of it.
3:38Lituya Bay was a trap. It just needed
3:42something to spring it.
3:44July 9th, 1958.
3:47Three boats were anchored in the bay
3:49that night, small commercial fishing
3:52vessels sheltering in what looked
3:54[music] like the safest water on the
3:56coast.
3:57On the Edrie was Howard Ulrich and his
4:00young son.
4:02On the Badger were Bill and Vivian
4:04Swanson.
4:06On the Sunmore, Orville and Mickey
4:08Wagner.
4:10By 10:00, the bay was still. [music]
4:13Then, at around 10:15 in the evening,
4:16the Fairweather Fault let go.
4:19The earthquake [music] that struck
4:21measured around magnitude 7.8.
4:24It was enormous.
4:26The ground along the fault shifted
4:28violently, in places moving several
4:31meters sideways in an instant. The
4:34shaking tore across the region, and in
4:36the boats, the crews were thrown awake
4:39as their vessels bucked and rolled.
4:42But the earthquake was not the disaster.
4:45The earthquake was only the trigger.
4:49High above the head of the bay, at the
4:51top of a steep mountain slope, roughly
4:5430 million cubic meters of rock had been
4:57sitting for centuries.
4:59Fractured, loose, undercut over the
5:02years by the glacier below.
5:05The shaking broke it free.
5:08An entire mountainside, tens of millions
5:11of tons of solid rock, detached at once
5:15and fell more than 900 meters straight
5:18down into the deep water at the head of
5:21Lituya Bay.
5:23Here is where the physics turns
5:25terrifying.
5:27A normal tsunami is generated by the
5:29seafloor moving, displacing an enormous
5:32volume of water across a huge area.
5:35That energy spreads out over an entire
5:38ocean.
5:39By the time it reaches shore, it is
5:42devastating, but it is rarely more than
5:44a few meters high in the open sea.
5:48What happened at Lituya was completely
5:51different. [music] It was not a tsunami
5:53in the ordinary sense.
5:55It was a splash.
5:58Imagine dropping a boulder into a
6:00bathtub.
6:01The water has nowhere to spread, so it
6:04goes up.
6:05Now scale that up.
6:07A mountain falling 900 m into a narrow,
6:10enclosed, extremely deep bay.
6:14The rock hit the water with unimaginable
6:16force.
6:18The water had nowhere to go but up and
6:21up the opposite slope.
6:23Directly across from the landslide,
6:25water surged up the mountain side on the
6:28far shore to a height of 524
6:31m.
6:321,720
6:34ft.
6:35Stop and picture that number properly.
6:39The Eiffel Tower is 330 m tall.
6:43This water went 200 m higher than that.
6:48It was taller than the Empire State
6:50Building.
6:51Taller than almost every building
6:53humanity has ever constructed.
6:56We know the exact height because the
6:58wave left a receipt.
7:01It scoured the mountain side completely
7:03bare.
7:04Every tree, every root, every centimeter
7:08of soil above the water line was
7:10stripped away [music] and swept off
7:12leaving raw bedrock exposed.
7:15When investigators [music]
7:16arrived afterward, they could measure
7:19the trim line with precision.
7:21There was a clear, brutal boundary.
7:24Below it, nothing. Above it, untouched
7:27forest.
7:29Around 400 million cubic meters of
7:32forest and soil were torn from the
7:34slopes of that bay [music] in a matter
7:36of moments.
7:38That 500 m number is the run-up. The
7:41height the water climbed on the slope.
7:44What raced down the length of the bay
7:46afterward was lower, but no less deadly.
7:50A wall of water and debris moving at
7:54somewhere between 100 and 200 km per
7:57hour
7:58heading straight for the three boats.
8:02Howard Ulrich saw it coming.
8:04He described watching the water rise at
8:06the head of the bay,
8:08an enormous wall moving toward him, and
8:11hearing a deafening roar.
8:14He grabbed his son, made sure his life
8:17jacket was on, and tried to start the
8:19engine and get the anchor up.
8:21The anchor would not come free. It was
8:24jammed.
8:26This is the moment that decides
8:28everything.
8:29A chained boat in front of a wall of
8:31water is a dead boat.
8:34Ulrich made a decision that saved both
8:36their lives.
8:38He gave the engine power and let the
8:40wave take him, and the force of the
8:42water snapped the anchor chain.
8:45The Edrie was carried up the face of the
8:47wave.
8:48He described riding [music] up and over
8:50it, the boat climbing the wall of water,
8:53and then dropping down the backside as
8:55the wave passed beneath him and
8:57continued on toward the mouth of the
8:59bay.
9:01He rode it out.
9:02He kept the boat afloat, and when the
9:04water finally settled, he and his son
9:07were alive.
9:09On the Badger, Bill and Vivian Swanson
9:12experienced something even harder to
9:14believe.
9:16Their boat was picked up by the wave and
9:18carried backward, stern first, over the
9:21spit of land at the entrance to the bay.
9:24The Swansons later described looking
9:26down and seeing the trees below them.
9:30The wave carried their boat clear over a
9:32strip of land that normally stood well
9:35above sea level and dropped them into
9:37the open ocean beyond.
9:40The boat was wrecked and sinking.
9:42They got into a [music] small dinghy and
9:44were rescued a couple of hours later.
9:47The third boat, the Sunmore, tried to
9:50run [music] for the entrance of the bay.
9:52It did not make it.
9:54The wave caught it near the mouth
9:56[music] and swept it out.
9:58Orville and Mickey Wagner were never
10:00found.
10:02Two dead, four survivors.
10:05In an event that produced the tallest
10:07[music] wave ever measured on Earth,
10:09that anyone lived at all is close to
10:11miraculous.
10:14For a long time, the story of Lituya Bay
10:17sounded [music] too extreme to be true.
10:20When the first reports came in
10:21describing a wave over 500 [music] m
10:24high, plenty of people simply did not
10:27believe it.
10:28It sounded like a fisherman's
10:30exaggeration.
10:32But the geologists who came to
10:33investigate [music]
10:34did not have to rely on testimony.
10:38The mountainside itself was the
10:40evidence.
10:41The stripped slopes, [music]
10:42the sharp trim line, the raw rock
10:45scoured clean of everything that had
10:47grown there for centuries.
10:50The bay had written down [music] exactly
10:52what happened.
10:54Lituya Bay gave science a name for this
10:57kind of [music] event.
10:58A mega tsunami.
11:00Not a tsunami generated by the seafloor
11:03shifting,
11:04>> [music]
11:04>> but by a mass of rock or ice collapsing
11:07into a body of water and displacing
11:10[music] it violently upward.
11:12And that distinction matters enormously
11:15because landslide generated waves are
11:18not rare.
11:20They happen wherever three conditions
11:22meet.
11:23Steep unstable slopes,
11:25deep water directly below them, and a
11:28trigger.
11:29Usually an earthquake.
11:31Sometimes just gravity and time.
11:35That combination exists in fjords in
11:37Norway and Greenland, in glacial valleys
11:40in Alaska and Chile,
11:42in reservoirs behind dams, and around
11:45volcanic islands whose flanks are slowly
11:48sliding into the sea.
11:51The obvious question is whether it could
11:53happen again.
11:54The answer [music] is that it already
11:56has, on smaller scales, more than once.
12:00In recent decades, scientists [music]
12:03have documented landslide-generated
12:05waves in Alaskan fjords, some reaching
12:08heights of tens or even hundreds of
12:10meters.
12:11And there is a growing concern connected
12:14to a changing [music] climate. If you
12:16enjoyed this, subscribe and tell us in
12:18the comments,
12:19>> [music]
12:19>> could you have made the right decision
12:21in those 3 minutes?
12:23Watch next [music] as we uncover another
12:25moment when the Earth reminded us who is
12:28actually in charge.

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