Record tsunami The most powerful thing in the world occurred on the South Coast of Alaska in 1958. The height of the sea wave was said to have reached 1,719 feet or about 524 meters.
The tsunami occurred after it was triggered by an 8.3 magnitude earthquake on the Fairweather Fault. The earthquake also caused landslides near Lituya Bay.
Quoted from Live Science, the tsunami waves that killed five people even exceeded the height of the Empire State Building in New York, United States. The Empire State is known to be 443 meters high.
“This is the largest wave ever recorded and witnessed by eyewitnesses,” said Hermann Fritz, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Fritz also wrote his research in the Journal of Pure and Applied Geophysics, published in 2009. In this research he used a 1:1675 scale laboratory tank to imitate the shape of the bay caused by the tsunami.
The test results found that the maximum height of the waves to be able to flatten the trees is about 150 meters. That made the tsunami on Alaska’s South Coast the highest wave ever recorded on Earth.
“Larger waves have likely occurred throughout Earth’s history, as evidenced by geological deposits, although this can be interpreted,” he added.
Researchers estimate that there is a flow of water reaching 1.1 billion cubic feet or about 30 million cubic meters into Lituya Bay.
Lituya Bay is a fjord, a long, narrow, steep-sided coastal cove formed by ancient glaciers.
The bay is about 9 miles or 14.5 kilometers long by about 2 miles or 3.2 kilometers wide, 220 meters deep and connected to the Gulf of Alaska by 300 meters wide.
Fritz explained that during a tsunami, the resulting waves radiate outward in the form of a fan. However, Lituya Bay is narrow and steep, causing waves to be channeled in one direction which makes the water pushed up the slopes which makes the runup or the height reached by the waves after reaching land becomes very large.
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