lituya bay tsunami case study

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A flying boat dropped Paddy Sherman’s mountaineering expedition at Lituya Bay on June 17, 1958. Over the next three weeks, the climbers made the second ascent of Mount Fairweather , a first ascent of an unnamed peak, and had come within 200 feet of the first ascent of Mount Lituya. When hot weather made glacier travel untenable, they returned to Lituya Bay and radioed a request to be picked up on July 10.

Lituya Bay offers the only sheltered anchorage for a long stretch of Southeast Alaska coast, but the bay itself is hardly safe. Cenotaph Island, a large wooded mound at the center of the bay, is named for the 21 members of the La Perouse expedition who drowned in 1798 after capsizing in the tidal bore at the bay’s shallow entrance.

In the 1950s, a sturdy cabin on the island served as a sometime base camp for Don Miller, a geologist who had taken an interest in Lituya Bay’s other great hazard. Distinct trimlines—demarcations in the vegetation with young growth below and old growth above—showed where unusually large waves had torn through the bay and run up hillsides as high as 490 feet. Miller believed he had identified four such waves over the last century, but he did not know their cause.

The earthquake

The mountaineers’ pilot came early, on the evening of July 9, forcing a mad scramble to leave before nightfall. By 9pm they were in the air, leaving behind three fishing boats that had come into the steep-walled bay for the night. The Sunmore  and  Badger were each crewed by married couples. Howard Ulrich had brought his seven-year-old son along on the  Edrie .

The earthquake struck at 10:16pm. Ulrich was awakened by the shaking and went up on deck. Avalanches were coming down the mountains at the head of the bay.

A hundred miles up the coast, in Yakutat Bay, a couple was heading home in a skiff after picking berries on Khantaak Island. They felt the quake and watched as an 800-foot stretch of the island's beach disappeared into the bay along with three of their friends .

In Yakutat, the earthquake damaged bridges and docks and knocked a water tower to the ground. Two hundred miles to the south, underwater landslides in Lynn Canal severed ACS's Juneau-Skagway cable in four places. 

11,300 feet up Mount St. Elias, another group of climbers felt the ground moving in waves as avalanches pounded down the slopes around them. Nine days later, descending after a blizzard suffocated one of the men in his tent, the survivors found the landscape of snow and ice deeply altered, and no sign of the lower camp where they had cached their snowshoes.

The magnitude 7.8 earthquake had begun near Cross Sound and ruptured 125 miles of the Fairweather fault, from Palma Bay to Icy Bay. It was felt from Seattle to Whitehorse, though most of the structural damage was confined to Yakutat. All five deaths occurred in the water, which speaks to the nature of earthquake hazards in Southeast. The Fairweather fault does not produce the largest earthquakes, but the danger from these earthquakes is increased by the combination of steep slopes, unconsolidated soils, narrow fjords, and a population that lives and works by the sea.

The Fairweather fault runs directly through Gilbert and Crillon inlets, which form the crosspiece at the top of Lituya Bay's distinctive "T" shape. During the earthquake, the southwest side of the inlets moved about 20 feet northwest relative to the opposite shore, on the other side of the fault.

After a minute or so of shaking, Ulrich heard a great roar from the head of the bay. This was followed by an explosion of water in Gilbert Inlet, which gave birth to a wave that Ulrich described as “the smallest part of the whole thing” even though it was at least 100 feet high.

The Wagners on the  Sunmore reacted first, raising their anchor and making for the entrance of the bay. As the wall of water rushed down the inlet, Ulrich found that that his anchor was hopelessly stuck. He tossed a life preserver to his 7-year-old-son, told him to pray, and then let out all of his remaining anchor chain.

After a minute or so the wave reached Cenotaph Island, breaking as it came around the left side but smooth-faced on the right. Ulrich steered into the wave and the Edrie shot up its face, snapping the anchor chain and sending it whipping around the pilot house. The boat rode over the crest of the wave, down its shallower tailing side, and was carried by a returning wave towards the center of the bay. Somehow the Edrie  was still afloat with its motor still running.

Nearer the mouth of the bay, at Anchorage Cove, the wave picked up the Badger  and threw it over the spit. Bill Swanson described his boat lodged bow-first near the crest of the wave, as if surfing it backwards, as he looked down at treetops far below him. The boat crashed down and foundered on the far side of the spit, but Swanson and his wife Vivian were able to escape the wreck in their skiff with just the clothes they were wearing and a chair for a paddle. 

The  Edrie , meanwhile, was caught in a mess of disordered, 20-foot chop filled with ice and logs. As the waves calmed, Ulrich piloted through the debris and made a harrowing escape through the shallow entrance at around 11pm. A little after midnight, a boat responding to Ulrich's mayday calls found and rescued the Swansons.

The  Sunmore   had vanished, and the Wagners were never found.

Investigations

Don Miller, the geologist, was on a USGS barge in Glacier Bay when the earthquake struck. The barge heaved, and Miller watched as rocks fell from high cliffs into the bay. In the morning, he learned of the disaster in Lituya Bay and chartered a float plane to take him there. They flew over rafts of logs fanning out in the open water as far as five miles from the mouth of the bay. Once over the bay, they could not land because its entire surface was strewn with tree trunks and giant blocks of ice.

Miller wrote that the hillsides were dripping with water while the streams that drained small lakes above the bay were running down in swollen torrents. In Gilbert Inlet, which branches north at a right angle from the head of the bay, Miller found that a stream delta had vanished and 1,300 feet of ice had sheared off the end of Lituya Glacier. Up on the northeast wall, Miller spotted a huge landslide scar with cascades of rock still running down it. Opposite this scar, on the spur that forms the corner between Gilbert Inlet and the main part of the bay, pilot Kenneth Loken flew alongside a sharp new trimline below which the trees and earth had been stripped away to clean bedrock. Incredibly, the altimeter read 1,800 feet—1,300 feet higher than the 1936 trimline.

When Miller returned to study the effects of the wave, he measured the highest trimline more precisely at 1,720 feet. For most of the bay, destruction below the trimline was absolute. Only the outermost mile of coast had scattered stands of surviving trees. The lighthouse at Harbor Point and the cabin on Cenotaph Island were both gone without a trace. The site of the mountaineers' camp was scoured down to bedrock.

From variations in the height of the trimline, Miller inferred that part of the wave had washed over the spur while the rest of it crossed the bay diagonally and struck the south side near Mudslide Creek, creating the second highest trimline. From there it raced toward the mouth of the bay—and the fishing boats—with some side-to-side sloshing that accounted for variations in the height of the trimline along the length of the bay.

To Miller, the destruction he saw was clearly the work of a giant wave, but its height seemed unbelievable. Miller wrote that his observations were "widely doubted both on theoretical grounds and on the basis of aerial observations and study of photographs by others." Scientists who had not seen the effects of the wave firsthand argued that above 300 feet, the soil and trees must have slid into the bay during the earthquake. But Miller had seen driftwood and rocks strewn across the slopes at the top of the trimline, and the trees that had not been washed into the bay all lay on the ground pointing westward, as the wave had traveled. Miller could not explain how the earthquake had caused such an enormous wave, but he was certain that it had.

Miller first assumed that the wave had been caused by the large movements along the fault in the inlets. Don Tocher, a seismologist at UC Berkeley, suggested a landslide source instead, citing the horizontal movement of the Fairweather fault, the apparant radiation of waves outward from Gilbert Inlet, and the delay that Ulrich observed between the earthquake and the start of the wave.

A second Berkeley researcher, R.L. Wiegel, built a 1:1000 scale model of Lituya Bay and found that he could more or less recreate Miller's observations given a large enough mass of rocks falling as a unit into Gilbert Inlet at high velocity. The landslide scar, which was high above Gilbert Inlet on a near-vertical slope, appeared to have dumped about 40 million tons of rock into the inlet all at once.

In 2001, Hermann Fritz and Willi Hager attempted to replicate the initial wave's 1,720-foot run-up using a pneumatic landslide generator to blast simulated rockslides into at 1:675 scale model of Gilbert Inlet. Fritz and Hager found that a slide like the one at Gilbert Inlet could generate that much run-up because the rapid impact of the slide would bring a large air cavity into the water behind it, displacing far more water than just the volume of the rock.

Wiegel's and Fritz's research reinforced Miller's observations as well as Ulrich's eyewitness account of the massive wave in Gilbert Inlet. However, Steven Ward and Simon Day of UC Santa Cruz felt that the Gilbert Inlet slide alone could not account for the size of the wave that swept through the outer bay or the amount of material deposited at the bottom of Gilbert Inlet. Their 2010 paper describes a possible double slide, where the destruction of the toe of Lituya Glacier triggered a much larger, slower submarine slide of glacial deposits after the initial rockslide. Proving this would require surveying the bottom of Gilbert Inlet to measure and date the layers of sediment. In other words, 60 years after the Lituya Bay tsunami, we are still working out how it happened.

Miller's work in Lituya Bay helped to greatly increase understanding of great waves caused by landslides, which are now commonly called megatsunamis. Six years later, the magnitude 9.2 Great Alaska earthquake would trigger landslide tsunamis across southern Alaska, accounting for many of the deaths from that earthquake. Miller was not around to study these, as he had drowned on the Kiagna River with a young assistant in 1961. Fittingly, a research vessel named after Miller served as George Plafker's base of operations for some of his work studying changes to the Alaska coastline after the 1964 earthquake--work that would greatly advance understanding of plate tectonics and especially subduction.

Megatsunamis in Southeast Alaska

Unfortunately, the qualities that make Lituya Bay so prone to landslide tsunamis are found in bays and fjords throughout Southeast Alaska. The combination of steep slopes rising directly out of the sea, rapid erosion from glaciers and heavy coastal precipitation, and frequent earthquakes all contribute to frequent landslides capable of causing tsunamis. It’s also possible that big landslides are becoming more common as glaciers retreat, removing support from the lower slopes of steep valleys.

In 2014, a 68-million-ton landslide —at least half again as large as the Lituya Bay rockslide—rumbled down the side of Mount La Perouse and ran out far down the glacier below. In June 2016, pilot Paul Swanstrom followed a strange dust plume and found the aftermath of a more than 100-million-ton slide onto the Lamplugh Glacier . Fortunately, both of these slides ran out onto glaciers instead of into water.

That was not the case in 2015, when 180 million tons of rock—the largest non-volcanic landslide ever documented in North Amerca—into Taan Fjord, an inlet of Icy Bay. Some of the material landed on the toe of Tyndall Glacier, but enough of it slammed into the water to generate a megatsunami with 600-foot run-up .

Large earthquakes sometimes start the landslides that cause megatsunamis, as in Lituya Bay, but not always. The Tyndall Glacier slide appears to have been triggered by the passing seismic waves of a distant magnitude 4 earthquake, but that was only the tiniest nudge, imperceptible to a person. The undersea slide that killed one in Skagway in 1994 was not triggered by an earthquake at all, but by an extreme low tide.

So far we have been lucky to have few human impacts from recent landslide tsunamis in Alaska, but a disaster in Greenland in 2017 should serve as a warning. There, a collapsing bluff started a wave that killed four people and caused much damage in the village of Nuugaatsiaq. The landslide was not caused by an earthquake, and residents had no warning before the wave arrived .

Unfortunately, landslide tsunamis are especially difficult disasters to prepare for. Usually even a megatsunami like Lituya Bay is a localized disaster, and technology-based warning systems cannot work quickly enough to help people just a few miles from the source. In Lituya Bay, fewer than five minutes passed between the earthquake and when the wave reached the boats. 

Slope stability assessments can help to identify potential slides before they happen, but this is expensive, and Southeast's thousands of miles of steep coastline make it impractical except in a small number of targeted locations. Education is our best tool. People living in coastal communities should understand how megatsunamis happen and what to do if they are near the water when they feel an earthquake or witness a large slide (hint: run uphill). Our tsunami inundation maps  include landslide tsunami scenarios for some of Alaska's most at-risk communities, showing which areas are likely to be safe and which are not. 

Still, living with the danger of megatsunamis is part of the cost of working and playing in one of the world's most breathtaking landscapes. Like Paddy Sherman's climbers and the fishermen who survived the wave, it helps to be lucky.

Philip Fradkin (2001), Wildest Alaska, University of California.

Hermann Fritz and Willi Hager (2001), " Lituya Bay Case: Rock Slide Impat and Wave Run-Up "

Don J. Miller (1960), " Giant Waves at Lituya Bay, Alaska "

Don Tocher (1960), " The Alaska Earthquake of July 10, 1958: Movement on the Fairweather Fault and Field Investigation of Southern Epicentral Region "

Steven N. Ward and Simon Day (2010), " The 1958 Lituya Bay Landslide and Tsunami - A Tsunami Ball Approach "

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Description

On July 10, 1958, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake occurred on the Fairweather Fault in southeast Alaska. It caused significant geologic changes in the region, including areas that experienced uplift and subsidence. It also caused a rockfall in Lituya Bay that generated a wave with a maximum height of 1,720 feet – the world’s largest recorded tsunami.

Above: The stump of a living tree broken off by the wave at the mouth of Lituya Bay, about 7 miles from where the wave originated. The hat brim is 12 inches in diameter.  (Image: D.J. Miller, USGS/Wikimedia Commons)

Left: Decades after the tsunami, damage to the edges of the bay (the light green areas) can clearly be seen on this Landsat image. (Image: Geology.com/NASA Landsat) geologist, had already documented a total of three other major tsunamis at this location; he flew out to the site the next day, and although he was able to take photos from the air, it was another three weeks before it was safe enough to land to document the destruction. He found that all evidence of previous tsunamis had been destroyed by this one.

Scientists were puzzled for some time by the sheer size of the wave, because they could not identify a mechanism that could have created such a massive reaction. Ultimately, it was discovered that a piece of rock, 2,400 feet by 3,000 feet, and 300 feet thick, had dislodged from the face of the northern wall of the inlet, and fallen 2,000 feet into the bay. In some respects, it created a similar reaction to that which would have occurred if an asteroid had fallen into the water.

Lessons Learned

Unfortunately, there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent any of the five deaths. The earthquake was so strong, and the tsunami came so quickly, that there was not time to get to a safe place. It does, however, highlight the importance of documenting such events for posterity, and to consider such extreme events when making development decisions for coastal areas in areas with high seismicity or vulnerability to tsunamis.

References and Additional Resources

USC Tsunami Research Group: 1958 Lituya Bay Tsunami

http://www.usc.edu/dept/tsunamis/alaska/1958/webpages/index.html

Disaster Pages of Dr. George PC: “The Mega-Tsunami of July 9, 1958 in Lituya Bay, Alaska”

http://www.drgeorgepc.com/Tsunami1958LituyaB.html

The Giant Waves of Lituya Bay

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AlaskaScienceForum/article/giant-waves-lituya-bay

BBC Nature: Mega Tsunami – Alaskan Super Wave – Amazing Survival

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN6EgMMrhdI

• Corpus ID: 131604156

Lituya Bay Case Rockslide Impact and Wave Run-up

• Published 2001
• Geology, Environmental Science

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The 1958 lituya bay landslide and tsunami — a tsunami ball approach.

• STEVEN N. WARD  and 

Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA

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Benfield UCL Hazard Research Center, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Many analyses of tsunami generation and inundation solve equations of continuity and momentum on fixed finite difference/finite element meshes. We develop a new approach that uses a momentum equation to accelerate bits or balls of water over variable depth topography. The thickness of the water column at any point equals the volume density of balls there. The new approach has several advantages over traditional methods: (1) by tracking water balls of fixed volume, the continuity equation is satisfied automatically and the advection term in the momentum equation becomes unnecessary. (2) The procedure is meshless in the finite difference/finite element sense. (3) Tsunami balls care little if they find themselves in the ocean or inundating land. We demonstrate and validate the tsunami ball method by simulating the 1958 Lituya Bay landslide and tsunami. We find that a rockslide of dimension and volume (3 - 6 × 10 7 m 3 ) generally consistent with observations can indeed tumble from 200–900 m height on the east slope of Gilbert Inlet, splash water up to ~ 500 m on the western slope, and make an impressive tsunami running down the length of the fiord. A closer examination of eyewitness accounts and trimline maps, however, finds a "rockslide only" tsunami somewhat lacking in size outside of Gilbert Inlet. This discrepancy, coupled with fact that ~ 3 × 10 8 m 3 of sediment infilled the deepest parts of Lituya Bay between 1926 and 1959, suggests that the source of the 1958 tsunami was not one landslide, but two. The initial rockslide generated the famous big splash and cratered the floor in front of Lituya Glacier. We propose that the impact of the rockslide destabilized the foundation of the Glacier and triggered a second larger, but slower moving subglacier slide. The subglacier slide induced the fresh normal faults on the collapsed glacier above, helped to bulk up the rockslide tsunami outside of Gilbert Inlet, and supplied most of the infill evident in post-1958 bathymetric charts.

• Lituya Bay landside
• tsunami ball approach
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• Quantitative Risk Analysis of a Rainfall-Induced Complex Landslide in Wanzhou County, Three Gorges Reservoir, China Lili Xiao, Jiajia Wang, Yanbo Zhu and Jun Zhang 4 March 2020 | International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, Vol. 11, No. 3
• The 1958 Lituya Bay tsunami – pre-event bathymetry reconstruction and 3D numerical modelling utilising the computational fluid dynamics software Flow-3D Andrea Franco, Jasper Moernaut, Barbara Schneider-Muntau, Michael Strasser and Bernhard Gems 18 August 2020 | Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, Vol. 20, No. 8
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Lituya Bay’s Apocalyptic Wave

July 1, 2020 JPEG

When he first encountered Lituya Bay in 1786, the French explorer Jean-François de Galaup La Pérouse was intrigued by an odd line in the forests that surrounded the narrow fjord in southeastern Alaska. It was as though the forests “had been cut cleanly with a razor blade,” he noted in his log.

It was the first clue that the seemingly placid, protected waters of the bay had a more destructive side. Another came when he dispatched three small boats to measure the depth of the water near the entrance of the bay. Despite the weather being calm, two of the three boats capsized after being drawn into roiling tidal currents that had been amplified by the fjord’s narrow shape. Twenty-six men lost their lives, their remains never to be found. It was in their honor that the lone island in the bay was given the name Cenotaph, a Greek word meaning “empty tomb.”

The name turned out to be all too fitting. In 1899, an earthquake triggered a giant wave that destroyed a native village and drowned 5 people on the island. Another tsunami wave hit in 1936. But it was in 1958 that Lituya Bay’s unpredictable waters reared up in truly apocalyptic fashion. After a 7.8 earthquake throttled the nearby Fairweather Fault, a rockslide sent 90 million tons of rock plunging into the bay—an amount equivalent to 8 million dump truck loads.

Eyewitness reports describe a chaotic and surreal scene: Intense shaking for several minutes, an explosive boom, and a shattered glacier soaring hundreds of feet into the air. Then a series of giant waves dotted with hunks of ice raced through the bay. One fisherman described his boat being lofted over a forested spit on the crest of one wave and looking down at trees below. The wave obliterated a cabin on Cenotaph island and swept away a lighthouse near the mouth of the bay. One couple that had been fishing when the wave hit were never heard from again.

The damage line in the forest—geologists call it a trimline—generally extended to an elevation of 700 feet (200 meters) around much of the bay. On one ridge opposite the slide, waves splashed up to an elevation of 1,720 feet (524 meters)—taller than New York’s Empire State Building. The event at Lituya Bay still stands as one of the tallest tsunami waves known to science. The photo above, taken in 1958 after the tsunami, shows the ring of damage around much of the bay.

Evidence of the cataclysmic wave is still visible from space more than 60 years later. As seen in the false-color Landsat 8 image ( bands 7-5-3 ) at the top of the page, the damaged trimline is still imprinted in the forest. The lighter green areas along the shore indicate places where forests are younger than older trees (darker areas) that were not affected by the tsunami. When the tsunami hit, it snapped all of the trees and scoured away almost all vegetation. Some 2 square miles (4 square kilometers) of forest were sheared and swept away by the tsunami waves.

One of the causes of the enormous waves in Lituya Bay was that an entire chunk of a mountain peak—estimated to be 2,400 feet by 3,000 feet by 300 feet—broke free from a cliff and dropped 2,000 feet. “In some respects, it created a similar reaction to that which would have occurred if an asteroid had fallen into the water,” said the authors of a summary from the Western States Seismic Policy Council. The photo above, taken in 1958, shows the scar left behind after the rock slide. After the initial blast, Lituya Bay’s narrow shape and U-shaped seafloor also amplified the waves, causing them to slosh back and forth like swells in a huge bath tub.

Lituya Bay’s steep walls, the geometry of its seafloor, and the fact that it intersects a fault that is often a source of earthquakes suggests that Lituya Bay will see more tsunamis in the future. After scrutinizing the bay’s geology and history for years, one scientist calculated giant waves happen there once every quarter century—a 1 in 9000 chance on any given day. The threat from the tidal currents that thwarted La Pérouse is more constant. Since the 1958 wave, an average of one fishing boat has been lost at the entrance of the bay per year, reports Philip Fradkin in the book, Wildest Alaska: Journeys of Great Peril in Lituya Bay .

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey . Aerial photos of Lituya Bay and the source of the rockslide by Don Miller for the USGS. Story by Adam Voiland .

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One of the tallest tsunami waves known to science slammed this Alaskan bay in 1958.

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References & Resources

• Damn Interesting (1960) Ten Minutes in Lituya Bay . Accessed November 20, 2020.
• Fradkin, P. (2001) Wildest Alaska, Journeys of Great Peril in Lituya Bay . University of California Press.
• Fritz, H.M. et al. (2009) Lituya Bay Landslide Impact Generated Mega-Tsunami 50th Anniversary . Pure Applied Geophysics, 166, 153-175.
• Miller, D. (1960) Giant Waves in Lituya Bay Alaska . Accessed November 20, 2020.
• Pararas-Carayannis, G. The Mega-Tsunami of July 9, 1958 in Lituya Bay, Alaska . Accessed November 20, 2020.
• Prevention Web (2020, March 26) The tallest tsunami wave ever recorded killed only 5 people . Accessed November 20, 2020.
• The Landslide Blog (2008, July 9) Lituya Bay—50 Years On . Accessed November 20, 2020.
• University of Alaska (2018, July 13) Lituya Bay . Accessed November 20, 2020.
• University of Alaska (2018, July 13) 60 Years Ago: The 1958 Earthquake and Lituya Bay Megatsunami . Accessed November 20, 2020.
• Western States Seismic Policy Council 1958 Lituya Bay Tsunami . Accessed November 20, 2020.

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The Lituya Bay Megatsunami: Here’s the Story Behind the Largest Wave Ever Recorded

Damage from the 1958 Lituya Bay megatsunami can be seen in this oblique aerial photograph of Lituya Bay, Alaska as the lighter areas at the shore where trees have been stripped away. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

At 10:15 p.m. on July 9, 1958, the Great Alaska Earthquake shook the hell out of the Gilbert Inlet. It occurred when the Fairweather fault slipped, triggering an earthquake that measured 7.8 to 8.3 on the Richter scale. That set off a chain of events that led to the largest megatsunami ever recorded: the Lituya Bay megatsunami.

The earthquake was of the strike-slip variety, in which two slabs move horizontally beside each other along a vertical fault line. When it hit, it shook loose some 30-million cubic yards of rock from a cliff that dropped into a narrow inlet (Lituya Bay). It wasn’t a short drop into the bay, either. All that debris fell from as high as 3,000 feet before landing, displacing an enormous amount of h20, which was shoved forcefully through the narrow strip of water towards the entrance of Gilbert Inlet. By the time it reached it, the megatsunami’s devastation reached 1,720 feet in height. Over a thousand feet of ice was sheared from the Lituya Glacier. Trees were ripped out by the roots, soil washed away down to the bedrock, and anything and everything that stood in the way was demolished in the blink of an eye.

According to reports , only five people were killed. Many more were injured and left homeless. Two of the people who died were on a fishing boat in the bay. In nearby Yakutat, bridges were destroyed, docks were ripped to splinters, and underwater communication cables were ripped from the seabed.

Incredibly, a fisherman named Howard Ulrich and his 7-year-old son were struck by the wave, but their boat, the Edrie, managed to stay above water. They both survived to tell the tale. Ulrich and his son were anchored in an inlet when the earthquake hit. Running up to the deck, he observed the wave forming. He recounted the experience in a paper published in 1960 .

“The wave definitely started in Gilbert Inlet, just before the end of the quake,” he explained. “It was not a wave at first. It was like an explosion, or a glacier sluff. The wave came out of the lower part, and looked like the smallest part of the whole thing. The wave did not go up 1,800 feet, the water splashed there.”

Part of the south shore of Lituya Bay showing the trimline, with bare rock below. Photo: Millar D.J., United States Geological Survey/WIkimedia Commons

According to the paper, the wave hit Ulrich’s vessel about three minutes after he spotted it. The Edrie was taken to the bay’s southern shore and then sucked back near the center again before Ulrich could regain control. That first wave, however, wasn’t the only wave, and he and his son endured subsequent waves up to 20-feet high before they finally escaped the bay.

Now, all these years later, evidence of the enormous wave is still visible. A line of damage reaching up to 700 feet around the outside of the bay is visible from an aerial perspective, and it remains the source of researchers’ interest. Interestingly, this likely wasn’t the first megatsunami to hit Lituya Bay. There is evidence of at least five others over a 150-year period, the first of which came from Jean Francois de Galaup, who was the first European person to sail into the the bay. In 1786, he wrote that all trees and vegetation had been ripped from the shoreline. Based on old photographs, between 1854 and 1916 there was at least one — if not two — tsunamis. In 1936, it’s believed a wave reached nearly 500 feet up the sides of the bay.

It’s likely that this will happen again at some point in the future, and the more researchers study the event, the better the chances of developing an early warning system.

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5 The Monster of Lituya Bay

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The remarkable story of the highest tsunami waves ever accurately measured relates the legend of the native Tlingit tribe inhabiting Lituya Bay, Alaska, telling of a monster who grabs and shakes the surface of the sea, and the European discovery of the bay in 1786 by the French explorer La Perouse with tragic consequences. In 1954, a brilliant geologist studying the bay interpreted strange lines in the forest as possibly the result of tsunami waves, but his innovative ideas were rebuffed by fellow scientists. Merely 4 years later in 1958, he would be proven correct when the “monster” struck again with waves reaching 1,740 ft (524 m) in the forest. The details of this incredible tsunami are described by survivors on boats anchored in the bay, whose firsthand accounts are truly amazing.

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The 1958 Lituya Bay tsunami – pre-event bathymetry reconstruction and 3D numerical modelling utilising the computational fluid dynamics software Flow-3D

Andrea franco, jasper moernaut, barbara schneider-muntau, michael strasser, bernhard gems, related authors.

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Numerical simulation of landslide-generated tsunamis in lakes: A case study of the Xiluodu Reservoir

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• Published: 14 December 2022
• Volume 66 , pages 393–407, ( 2023 )

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• Ting Huang 1 ,
• Huai Zhang 1 , 2 , 3 &
• Yaolin Shi 1  

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China has planned and built several world-class cascade high dams in Jinsha River, Dadu River, Lancang River, and Yarlung Zangbo River. The complex geological conditions in the reservoir area and numerous large-scale landslide bodies make the potential disaster risk of overflowing and cascade dam failure caused by landslide-generated tsunami under increasing severe situations. However, the study on describing and predicting the complex dynamic processes of generation, propagation, overflowing, wave setup, and the interaction between tsunami and lakeshore has not been systematically carried out. Based on the high-order Boussinesq-type equations, the development of the dynamic system of tsunamis in lakes coupled with the landslide process is realized using the finite volume method in this paper. To verify the accuracy and reliability of the study, the Xiluodu Reservoir is selected as the object to simulate the potential landslide-generated tsunamis. The factors such as the generation and propagation of tsunamis, dam overflowing, and wave setup in the downstream river are quantitatively evaluated and analyzed. The constructed landslide with a total volume of 24×10 6 m 3 generates a near-field wave amplitude of about 28 m. The maximum wave run-up height is about 95 m, the volume of the dam overflowing water up to 2.13×10 6 m 3 , and the maximum wave height above the dam crest presents an M-shaped distribution. This LGWs event raises the downstream water level by nearly 40 m. The results show that the risk of landslide-generated tsunamis in the reservoir area in China cannot be ignored. The developed Boussinesq-type equations coupled with the landslide dynamics can simulate the whole process of generation, propagation, runup, and estimating the overflowing water volume of the tsunamis in the lake, laying a foundation for the quantitative risk assessment of tsunamis in lakes of high cascade dams in China.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to appreciate the continued support of the computing platform provided by the Key Laboratory of Computational Geodynamics, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41725017), the National Key R&D Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant No. 2020YFA0713401), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. U1839207).

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Key Laboratory of Computational Geodynamics, College of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

Ting Huang, Huai Zhang & Yaolin Shi

Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), Zhuhai, 519080, China

Beijing Yanshan Earth Critical Zone National Research Station, Beijing, 101408, China

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Huang, T., Zhang, H. & Shi, Y. Numerical simulation of landslide-generated tsunamis in lakes: A case study of the Xiluodu Reservoir. Sci. China Earth Sci. 66 , 393–407 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-022-9989-1

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Received : 25 January 2022

Revised : 06 August 2022

Accepted : 11 August 2022

Published : 14 December 2022

Issue Date : February 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-022-9989-1

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