MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Literary Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry

AnotherCat · 12-18-2019, 05:17 PM

As I said I have a couple of things to pick on in this book, this is the main one. Picky and the meanderings of someone brought up associated with the sea maybe, but with the author being a practising journalist it made me wary of the rest of the book.

He claims at the beginning of the book that "At its peak, the water was 120 feet high." (the writer of the frontmatter also makes the claim). This figure, or something near it, I've seen repeated elsewhere too, but while it is valuable to journalists creating their stories it is very misleading and in the way they present it without clarification they either do not understand where the figure comes from or are intentionally distorting the actual situation in order to create tension in their story.

The 120 feet (or figures around that) is in fact the estimated maximum wave run-up height experienced during the Japan tsunami, it is not the height of the tsunami wave. The run-up height of a wave is the maximum elevation of the point on land that it reaches. So if one watches a wave arrive on a beach, for example, the run-up height is the highest part of the beach that it washes up to. If the beach is not steep the wave will run inland losing its energy to friction and turbulence and the run-up height will not be as high as on a steeply sloping beach where the wave will lose its energy by being forced to climb. The run-up height is inversely proportional to the steepness of the wave so steep waves have smaller run-up heights that less steep ones of the same height (which may seem counterintuitive). Tsunamis can have big run up heights compared to their wave height if faced with sloping ground because they are not very steep waves.

The 120 feet (an estimate) is from a location where the ground was steeply rising from the sea so the wave had to lose its energy very quickly by climbing the slope rather than losing to friction and turbulence if progressing inland over flat land. In fact, the tsunami's maximum height when it reached land was around 10m (an estimate because tide gauges were washed away in the area of maximum height) that diminishing rapidly as one moved North and South from the point of maximum. Therefore the updated official warnings issued about the impending tsunami and quoted in the book were for a 10m wave and they turned out to be correct, but nowhere that I found does the author clarify that it is those that were correct, not his claim that the tsunami was nearly four times that at "120 feet {37m} high".

12-18-2019, 05:17 PM	#10
AnotherCat .... Posts: 1,547 Karma: 18068960 Join Date: May 2012 Device: ....	As I said I have a couple of things to pick on in this book, this is the main one. Picky and the meanderings of someone brought up associated with the sea maybe, but with the author being a practising journalist it made me wary of the rest of the book. He claims at the beginning of the book that "At its peak, the water was 120 feet high." (the writer of the frontmatter also makes the claim). This figure, or something near it, I've seen repeated elsewhere too, but while it is valuable to journalists creating their stories it is very misleading and in the way they present it without clarification they either do not understand where the figure comes from or are intentionally distorting the actual situation in order to create tension in their story. The 120 feet (or figures around that) is in fact the estimated maximum wave run-up height experienced during the Japan tsunami, it is not the height of the tsunami wave. The run-up height of a wave is the maximum elevation of the point on land that it reaches. So if one watches a wave arrive on a beach, for example, the run-up height is the highest part of the beach that it washes up to. If the beach is not steep the wave will run inland losing its energy to friction and turbulence and the run-up height will not be as high as on a steeply sloping beach where the wave will lose its energy by being forced to climb. The run-up height is inversely proportional to the steepness of the wave so steep waves have smaller run-up heights that less steep ones of the same height (which may seem counterintuitive). Tsunamis can have big run up heights compared to their wave height if faced with sloping ground because they are not very steep waves. The 120 feet (an estimate) is from a location where the ground was steeply rising from the sea so the wave had to lose its energy very quickly by climbing the slope rather than losing to friction and turbulence if progressing inland over flat land. In fact, the tsunami's maximum height when it reached land was around 10m (an estimate because tide gauges were washed away in the area of maximum height) that diminishing rapidly as one moved North and South from the point of maximum. Therefore the updated official warnings issued about the impending tsunami and quoted in the book were for a 10m wave and they turned out to be correct, but nowhere that I found does the author clarify that it is those that were correct, not his claim that the tsunami was nearly four times that at "120 feet {37m} high". Last edited by AnotherCat; 12-18-2019 at 05:24 PM.