18 April 2011

New video of the Japanese tsunami

I've seen about a dozen different videos of the tsunami in the past month, but had not previously encountered this one.  It's a little bit different in that it's filmed from way inshore behind the city of  South Sanriku, where the hills rise up above the town.  This one also has full audio of the crunching sound of debris being ground by the wave, overlaid by the anguished voices of residents watching everything they own being destroyed.  And at the end, there are views of late-departing town residents running for their lives - a stark reminder of how many must have been running around hopelessly in the center of town.

If you're going to watch, I would suggest clicking the fullscreen option button; the resolution is good enough for that feature on this video.

Via Mashable.

3 comments:

  1. Makes a mockery of our safe little lives, doesn't it? I wonder how it changes a person to go through that. I'm shaking just watching the video.

    (The detached side of me is interested to hear the changes in voices from hopeless grief to 'emergency, move now' when the people on low ground appear, to at least one scream of sheer horror when it looks like someone who went back to help gets swept away. These things need no translation.)

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  2. I am wondering who filmed this. Not that I am distrusting the authenticity of the piece, but the camera seems to be swinging away from anyone getting washed into the oncoming waters. It's more or less human nature to stay focused on tragedies, not to swing away, professional wartime camera crews, on the other hand, have been trained to move away as soon as tragedy strikes.

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  3. After two big tsunamis in a bit over 5 years (after none really in my lifetime except perhaps the 1964 Anchorage one), my thoughts turned to Plato's account of Atlantis being sunken in the course of one day and a night. Atlantis seems so much more possible to me now.

    I frequent a site named www.cosmictusk.com, which discusses impacts, mostly cometary, including airbursts and ejecta patterns. The posts include links to scientific papers, presentation of indigenous accounts of what seem to be impacts within the time of man, and discussion on possible past impacts.

    One of the frequent posters and commenters is a friend, Ed Grondine, who has been working on the subject of impacts on the periphery of NASA for many years. Ed talks about the really big ones, the ones that cause mega-tsunamis, that can be perhaps 2-3 (even 4?) magnitudes worse than the Japanese tsunami.

    Watching the Japanese videos, with the massive amounts of debris, it is much more believable that Plato would say that the ocean in the area outside the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) would have been impassable to ships for many years. Something ten times worse might do that.

    The thing is, we are terribly vulnerable to such impacts, and if one a few km across hits in the ocean which is 71% of the Earth's surface, yes, ten times worse will happen.

    Without sounding like an advertisement for intervention plans, I don't see how we can avoid getting sent back to the stone age (literally), if we don't work out plans to intercept Near Earth Objects. It is the only time in history we have had the capacity to do it, to protect ourselves. Is it possible that there WAS an advanced civilization before ours? Who cares if it was called Atlantis or Smithville. If it was there and then it wasn't, it means we have been through that at least once. And that would mean that our history is completely different than we have been led to believe.

    Shoemaker-Levy/9 crashing into Jupiter 17 years ago woke us up a bit, and these tsunamis should give us an idea of the damage that is possible. But these have only been small samples. These videos are FRIGHTENING. I would not wish for anything worse to ever hit humankind. These have been bad enough...

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