The Perfect Storm
A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from abov... See more
The Really Big One
At three hundred feet, we are profoundly changed. The pressure at these depths is nine times that of the surface. The organs collapse. The heart beats at a quarter of its normal rate, slower than the rate of a person in a coma. Senses disappear. The brain enters a dream state. At six hundred feet down, the ocean’s pressure—some eighteen times that
... See moreJames Nestor • Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves
All AccuWeather’s press releases shared a couple of problems: 1) there was no easy way to confirm them, as the forecasts were private, and the clients unnamed; and 2) even if true they didn’t mean very much. A company selling private tornado warnings can choose the predictions on which it is judged. When it outperforms the National Weather Service,
... See moreMichael Lewis • The Fifth Risk
The crew stood abaft the windlass and hauled the jib down, while we got out upon the weather side of the jib-boom, our feet on the foot ropes, holding on by the spar, the great jib flying off to leeward and slatting so as almost to throw us off of the boom. For some time we could do nothing but hold on, and the vessel diving into two huge seas, one
... See moreRichard Henry Dana • Two Years Before the Mast
These currents are affected only slightly by the wind, so that often a condition known to sailors as a “cross sea” is set up—when the wind is blowing in one direction, and the current moving in another. At such times, angry hunks of water—3, 6, 10 feet high—are heaved upwards, much as when breakers are thrown back from a bulkhead and collide with i
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