4/1/14

History: 'Unexplainable' April Fools Day 1946 Pacific-Wide Tsunami Man Made? Tsunami Bomb[s]?

Related to: Geoengineered Tsunamis, 'Storm Surges'? 1999 Rescue Heroes Cartoon Demonstrates A 'Tsunami Bomb' 12-27-12 "According to the New Zealand government's declassified Project Seal report (referenced article linked in post) 'geoengineered' tsunamis are more than feasible, and have in fact been successfully created..The work was carried out by the 24th Army Troops Company, New Zealand Engineers with the co-operation of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, The U.S. Navy and the Royal New Zealand Navy between the 6th June, 1944, and the 8th January 1945. Some 3,700 experiments were carried out - The investigations lead to the conclusion that offensive inundation is possible under favourable circumstances. Given low lying forshores and a shelving bottom off-shore, wave amplitudes of the order of those for recorded tidal waves, which have been disastrous, can be obtained" [see post]
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Mystery of Deadly 1946 Tsunami Deepens (12-6-2004)

A mystery surrounding one of the most destructive tsunamis of the 20th Century just got more puzzling as a seafloor search failed to reveal the smoking gun scientists expected to find

Operation Crossroads 'Baker' Test - July 1946 off Bikini Atoll -
produced a reported 94' wave [link]
On April Fools Day in 1946 an earthquake off the coast of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska spawned a series of waves known as a tsunami. One wave as high as a 13-story building hit locally. Others raced across the Pacific, killing dozens and leaving a trail of destruction that stretched to California and even South America.

The earthquake was too small to spawn the huge local wave, many scientists agree, and they have struggled for decades to figure out what happened. The leading theory has been that the earthquake triggered an underwater landslide, generating a one-two punch.

But a seafloor-mapping project by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, designed specifically to look for the cause of the tsunami, didn't find evidence to support that theory.

"We found no landslide where there should have been a landslide, where I was positive there had to be a landslide," Gerard Fryer, a geophysics professor at the University of Hawaii, told LiveScience. "I was stunned that there was nothing there."

The calamity killed 159 people in Hawaii and caused $26 million in damage — in 1946 dollars.

The Pacific Ocean is a big place, and the waves spread. Surges up to 14 feet swamped Half Moon Bay, California. One person drowned in Santa Cruz. Fishing boats were damaged as far south as Chile.

The local tsunami in Alaska rose as high as 138 feet (42 meters), according to research by Emile Okal at Northwestern University. It destroyed the steel-reinforced Scotch Cape lighthouse on Unimak Island...It was this local surge that Fryer and Okal agree could not have been spawned by the earthquake alone.

Doesn't add up - The 1946 Alaska earthquake had a magnitude of 7.1. Based on what scientists understand about the energy and characteristics of the earthquake, it should not have been able to generate either such a large local surge or such a devastating Pacific-wide tsunami. The idea of a landslide contributing to the total energy was paired by some scientists with a theory that the earthquake was larger than the instrumentation of the day could measure.

Okal studied the earthquake and its aftershocks, which originated across a broader area than would be expected. That suggests the main temblor was more of a slow rumble than an abrupt break in the planet's crust...The slow movement, Okal says, would have been difficult for seismometers of the era to measure. He calculates a true size of the earthquake at around magnitude 8.5, which comes close to accounting for the tsunami's effects in Hawaii.

Okal says it still may be possible a landslide was involved in the complex events of 1946. He said there are important variables, including where the Scripps project looked and the size of landslide they searched for.

"Almost 60 years after the event, the 1946 tsunami is still making fools of all of us," Fryer said.

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re: "Doesn't add up"

The above article is ten years old, published fifty-eight years after the actual event. Today [4-1-14] would mark the 68th anniversary of the devastating 1946 Pacific-wide tsunami supposed to have been generated by a 7.1 Aleutian 'earthquake'. In 2004 the cause of the tsunami had still never been explained though, the latest theory then being that a massive underwater landslide triggered by the too-small earthquake would have been the only thing powerful enough to have generated the wave action. But, no evidence of any earthquake-triggered landslide that could have generated the massive tsunami could be found, said University of Hawaii geophysics professor Gerard Fryer after the July 2004 Scripps Institution of Oceanography seafloor-mapping project was completed. It will be noted though, as documented in the above article, that another new 'scientific explanation' was at that time being suggested by researcher Emile Okal, postulating that, according to his latest analysis of the data, the 'unusual nature' of this particular quake was the result of it being more of a "slow rumble" rather than an "abrupt break", and for this reason the instrumentation of the day was not able to give accurate data, meaning that an upgrade from a 7.1 to an 8.5 magnitude, which was supportable in his estimation, could explain the admittedly 'anomalous' tsunami generation.

Turns out that Okal did publish a new research paper the following year [2005], which he termed a "reassessment" of the seismological data, intended to 'scientifically explain' the highly anomalous too small of an earthquake for a giant tsunami event. It is a highly technical 15-page report giving a history of past research, which to date was still unsatisfactory (detailed throughout the report), alongside their 'new findings' which basically claim to settle the issue.

Apparently, doing this just required a rewriting of all the original data, i.e. 'reassessing' the 'type' of quake, adjusting the original reported magnitude of the quake, and relocating the source of the quake; and then concluding that while there were admitted anomalies, everything was otherwise perfectly consistent with normal tsunami generation. A few quotes which essentially sum up the 'reassessment findings':


A seismological reassessment of the source of the 1946 Aleutian ‘tsunami’ earthquake Alberto M. López and Emile A. Okal; oxfordjournals.org

Original form 2005 December 18 - The Aleutian earthquake of 1946 April 1 (origin time 12:29 GMT) remains a challenge to the seismological community. Despite a relatively low conventional magnitude (M= 7.4 reported at Pasadena (Gutenberg & Richter 1954), it unleashed a tsunami of catastrophic proportions both in the near field, where it destroyed the Scotch Cap lighthouse and ran up to 42 m on Unimak Island (Okal 2003a), and in the far field, where it killed 159 people in Hawaii, and inflicted damage and further casualties in the Marquesas Islands, Easter, and possibly even on the shores of Antarctica (Okal 2002). Indeed, the 1946 event is one of the charter members of the family of so-called ‘tsunami earthquakes’, defined by Kanamori (1972) as those earthquakes whose tsunamis are disproportionately larger than expected from their seismic magnitudes, especially conventional ones.

In this framework, the present paper offers a reassessment of the seismic properties of the 1946 event, based on main shock and aftershock relocation, spectral analysis of mantle waves, and the estimation of radiated energy. In simple terms, we propose a model reconciling all the available seismological data with a large dislocation source featuring an anomalously slow bilateral rupture.

RELOCATION - Our purpose in relocating the 1946 event and its aftershocks is to obtain an independent estimate of the rupture area of the event...Relocations were based on P and occasionally S arrival times listed by the ISS, and were performed using the interactive iterative method of Wysession et al. (1991), which features a Monte Carlo algorithm consisting of randomly injecting Gaussian noise into the data set, in order to assess the precision of the relocation; the standard deviation σ G of the noisewas set at 3 s, a value appropriate for 1946.

...our relocated epicentres are distant from 3 to 126 km (mean value: 25 km) from Sykes’ respective locations...We relocate the main shock at 53.31◦N; 162.88◦W (star on Fig. 1c), with an origin time of 12:29:02 GMT...This has some important consequences, which we discuss in some detail. First, the length of rupture required by this new model is double that proposed by previous authors (Sykes 1971; Pelayo 1990).

The earthquake source, documented in the present study as large and slow, can account for the far field tsunami (Okal & H´ebert 2005); it reconciles all available seismic observables, in particular the spatial and temporal distribution of aftershocks. The landslide source is necessary to explain the spectacular run-up at Scotch Cap (Okal et al. 2003a), but is predicted to contribute insignificantly to both the seismic spectrum and the far-field tsunami (Okal & H´ebert 2005).

The main conclusion of this study is that the seismological data available for the 1946 Aleutian earthquake can be explained by a dislocative source featuring a large, very slow, bilateral rupture. While a landslide may have been triggered by the earthquake, we find nothing in the seismic observables to warrant the suggestion by Fryer et al. (2004) that the whole event was a landslide exclusive of a major dislocation, or whose seismic trigger would have been so small as to make it invisible seismically.

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Apart from this 2005 report by Okal and Lopez, nothing more current could be found on the subject. Apparently the "mystery" of the 1946 'megatsunami' has been solved, end of story. The too-small of an earthquake for a mega-tsunami problem was now explained. The claim was made that while "all available seismic observables" have been satisfactorily reconciled to explain the "far field", i.e. Pacific-wide aspect of the tsunami - without a landslide, it was admitted that a "landslide source" to explain the anomalous 138-ft wave that hit Alaska would be necessary, but, it would have been 'seismically unobservable', according to Okal and Lopez. In other words, not dismissing the Scripps report, but discrediting it. Essentially saying that the fact that there is no landslide evidence is inconclusive (last two paragraphs above), confirming what he had already said as quoted in the above 2004 article where he questioned both the size of, and search location for, a "landslide" (2nd paragraph from bottom). His final 'reassessment' of the landslide-factor, ultimately found or not, is that it would "contribute insignificantly" to the overall picture. In other words, nothing to be overly concerned about.

With regard to the non-findings of any seafloor evidence for the 1946 Pacific wide ocean-displacement by the 2004 Scripps project, there is something very interesting to note about Okal and Lopez's final conclusions on the matter. Besides the relocated epicentres of the "main shock" and aftershocks of course, and the drastic magnitude change of 7.1 to 8.5, the most significant claim, 60 years after the fact, would have to be the claim of the 'recent discovery' of the source being a "bilateral rupture". A bilateral rupture would be a sideways motion, rather than up-down. 'Bi'-lateral would be both sides moving, rather than just one. This would be very useful to explain a much greater energy generation. Lateral movement of course would likely leave little observable change in the seafloor after so many years - everything is still basically the same level. Impossible to disprove in other words.

Leaving all that alone for the moment, it is interesting to note that the mid-forties was the exact time when the atomic bomb was first being tested. Reportedly the first test of an atomic bomb was held July 16, 1945:


"On July 16, the first atomic bomb was detonated in the desert near the Los Alamos research facility. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the project, watched the mushroom cloud rise into the New Mexico sky. "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds," he uttered, reciting a passage from an ancient Hindu text" [source]

The far more powerful hydrogen bomb, or thermonuclear as it is today called, 'nuke' for short, was also being developed at this same time. The first test of the hydrogen bomb was officially 1952 [source], but some sources claim that the development of the hydrogen was well advanced as early as 1944 [source - pg. 7].

It was also at this same time, as seen in the 'related to' post linked at top, that "Project Seal" was underway, experimenting successfully with explosive-generated tsunamis - called "tsunami bombs".

So what about that too-small of an earthquake to generate a Pacific-wide tsunami in 1946, although with new data now that supposedly rectifies all the 'supposed' anomalies? Some have claimed that the tsuanmi may have actually been the result of a very early hydrogen-bomb test conducted in Alaska, as the 'H-bomb' is far more powerful than a regular 'atomic' and could generate a Pacific-wide effect. [source]

Who can say? On that note though, and the concept of tsunami-bombs in general, it should be pointed out that, if a "tsunami bomb" really was ever used, why would anybody suppose that a "Pacific-wide tsunami" would have to be created with just one 'TB' - hydrogen or otherwise. Why could there not be a number of them in different locations (note that Hilo, Hawaii was devastated while the rest of the Hawaiian Islands chain was relatively unscathed). Multiple 'TB's', planted "Pacific-wide", and perfectly timed, the same 'megatsunami' effect could certainly be achieved. Seems like simple logic, if, that is, the actual possibility of such a thing being done were even conceivable.

Then again, what exactly did Fryer mean when he said, referring to the devastating "April fools day" 1946 Alaskan Pacific-wide tsunami (quoting the last line of the posted article): "Almost 60 years after the event, the 1946 tsunami is still making fools of all of us"?

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With that, reposting this 3-28-11 Newsweek "Apocalypse Now" magazine cover and comments may be in order; from: Superstorm Sandy? 10-30-12:

"Take a close look at this cover of Newsweek magazine dated March 28 & April 4, 2011. Now here is the point. What is the real cause of all the things mentioned there - "tsunamis, earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, revolutions, economies on the brink, etc." Are these things all naturally occurring, or, is the so-called "apocalypse" that the world is "now" seemingly experiencing being absolutely manufactured somehow in one way or another, i.e. weather-modifying, geo-engineering, and political manipulating...to deconstruct the old-world-order so as to replace it with the new-world-order of course?

For those who believe that all these things could actually be happening of their own accord - "It's like 'apocalypse now' dude" - the boys over at NWO central have a little message "hidden in plain sight" for you. It gives them quite a chuckle to do that you know. Do you see it?



They want to know...just "how ignorant are you?"

Rev. 18:4
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Jeremiah 5:22 'Fear ye not me? saith the LORD: will ye not tremble at my presence, which have placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it: and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it?'