Talk:Lituya Bay

Date?

There appears to be some difference in the date of the landslide from different sources - I've seen July 7th, July 8th, July 9th, and July 10th. Any ideas how we find out who is right? Average Earthman 12:31, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

To my eye the authoritative sources give it as the 9th. Some confusion may be caused because it was the 10th GMT at the time, but that's not what should be given as the date. Anyways, I'm changing it. Blahaccountblah (talk) 13:40, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Corrected height

The article stated that the tsunami was "more than 300m high", which is vague. I've taken the actual value (524m / 1472ft) from the Guiness Book of Records. This value features on one of the reference articles as well. Mouse Nightshirt 12:13, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

No what i think it means is that the wave when it was in the water was 300m(1000ft) high and then it sloshed a further 742ft up the mountain. Wiki235 18:23, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

From the treeless area bordering the shore and the size of the mountains, it appears that the size of the wave has been enlarged. Such limits can be between 150-200 meters high (near 495-660 feet) on the slopes that contour the fjord. That slosh could be caused by a wave measuring at most only 100 meters high instead of 500 meters, which is surreal. This theory is sound in accordance to the size of the bay. The bay should be deeper in excess to have created a high wave.

False precision

It may well be that an exact 3m is 9.8', but one hardly thinks a troop of giants stood there with chain sticks and simultaneously concluded that the tide reached a maximum of 3m every time! That 3m is an order-of-measure figure, telling us that in general tides are closer to 3m than either 2m or less, or 4m or more. So why do you say it's 9.8', with the implication that it's closer to that than 9.7' or less or 9.9' or more? If that is true, that figure should be the baseline quoted first. However it's not, and it's an approximation into the bargain, so the real comparison should surely be to the nearest comparable-order significant-figure digit, namely one, making it 10'. The next one down would be 7', and up 13', were it relevant (which in this instance it is not). And so on throughout the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.29.86.153 (talk) 00:17, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Asteroid synthesis?

This bothered me as it reads as synthesis...unless it's directly tied to Dr. Mader's report/study but even so its spectulative nature remains suspect; equally I took out the "like a monolith, and so resembling an asteroid comparison earlier on. "Gee willikers, Uncle Fred, it's an asteroid, run for cover!" Anyway:

Measurable output parameters derived from mathematical modeling and analysis of the Lituya Bay event, adjusted for scale, can be applied to the calibration, verification and validation of asteroid models of tsunami generation. Based on measured parameters of inundation, speed, and water particle velocities of the giant 1958 Lituya Bay waves, coefficients of friction can be derived empirically which may be used to estimate more realistically attenuation over a land mass, of an asteroid-generated tsunami as it travels chaotically past the sea-land boundary.

Is this in Mader's report/study, or is this a Wiki editor's extrapolation on same? Synthesis either way. There's a lot of pseudo-science/gibberish here, too, or was - "solitary gravity waves" etc. (which I also took out). Gravity wave is an entirely different thing....sounds cool, but not relevant to an oceanic wave effect....Skookum1 (talk) 20:01, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Superfluous but fancy-sounding adjectives adn adverbs jump out at me too - "as it travels chaotically past the sea-land boundary".....the "sea-land boundary" is otherwise known as a coastline, and in what other way is a wave going to travel - "orderly"? Redundancies and overblown non sequiturs abound....Skookum1 (talk) 20:04, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Why is this Mader study even here? It basically says "according to my model, the Lituya tsunami was possible". Sorry but it did happen regardless of anyone's model. Angry bee (talk) 06:07, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

General bad science

This article's importance really arose in the wake of a BBC Horizon program hypothesising a mega-tsunai based on the hypothesis that if a 2.5km-wide landslip containing some 120 cubic miles of rock on the west flank of La Palma, unkeyed from its base rock during an eruption in 1947, were to slide unstopped to the ocean floor, then the scoop effect might cause a similar tsunami around the Atlantic. However, it has not slid, despite another eruption in 1971 of the scale which the authors claimed would release it, nor has any subsequent sub-sea event substantiated the calculation. The most hypothetically comparable real event, the 1300km rupture in the Sumatra-Andaman Boxing Day 9 earthquake in 2004, displaced an estimated 7 cubic miles of rock at a very similar depth for a much longer time than the Las Palmas slide would, and produced significant waves nearby: but at a comparable distance to the crossing of the Atlantic hypothesised, the power of the waves diminished in proportion to the square of the distance from the incident, in accordance with the theory, and so by the time it reached Africa, a similar distance, it was nowhere near the scale claimed. Even scaling it up, by the time one applies the square rule, then the ripple would become a wave, not the 50m claimed but in the order of ten feet. Nor was there any indication of a "bounce" as claimed, in which the rebounding wave generates a secondary tsunami threatening Europe. There was a predictable interference effect as the wave passed around obstacles such as the tip of Sri Lanka and a number of island groups in the Indian ocean. More interestingly, a subsequent Royal Navy survey showed a number of very comparably sized landslides did occur on existing subsea thrust mounts. The similarly sized Japanese quake of 2011 caused waves of 8' in Oregon, a similar distance: the tidal rise on the American East Coast being some feet, and extreme wave heights comparable more, then the effect of any such event could depend on the exact weather state at the time: low tide and calm weather, nothing, high tise in a hurricane, a perfect storm - but nothing like the hysteria fluffed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.29.86.153 (talk) 01:50, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

IPA note

I just saw the IPA addition, which is for contemporary Alaskan English (Wasilla dialect or Juneau dialect, I wouldn't know LOL), but whatever the source langauge of the name is - Tlingit or Russian - that should be given too.Skookum1 (talk) 14:29, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Glacier as the additional landslide-generator

The 1958 landslide occurred due to an earthquake, but the location of the landslide suggests that the part of the mountain that sled was looser than the rest of it due to erosion caused by the glacier below. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.110.246.33 (talk) 18:55, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Do you have a source? Dleit Ḵaa (talk) 21:49, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

The Megatsunami Myth

Two eyewitness accounts exist, none of them estimate the wave to have been higher than 100 ft. The USGS report speculates it might have been 100-300 ft initially. The much-misunderstood 1,720 ft figure is how high water splashed on the mountain wall across the Gilbert Inlet immediately opposite the landslide, a horizontal distance of less than 5,000 ft. I suggest the "megatsunami" article be renamed and possibly expanded with a section on the myth. Captain Adhoc (talk) 16:43, 17 October 2013 (UTC)