Posted on 11/21/2008 3:22:46 PM PST by nickcarraway
About 2,300 years ago, a giant tsunami crashed ashore where New York City stands today.
No one knows for sure what caused it, but new clues found in the Hudson River's silt suggest an asteroid slammed into the Atlantic Ocean nearby.
Katherine Cagan of Harvard University and a team of researchers found carbon spherules -- perfectly round particles that form in the extreme pressures of an impact -- and other grains of shocked minerals in the sediments as well, but the discovery remains controversial.
Some say a wave big enough to leave sediments that far from the coast would have left similar markings in many more places.
"To get a wave 2.5 meters high that far up the Hudson, you need a wave 20 meters high at Manhattan," Steven Ward of the University of California, Santa Cruz told Discovery News. "It would've gone several hundred meters inland on Long Island; you should see evidence of this thing all over the place."
Also, experts say telling the difference between sediments washed up in a tsunami and those left by a strong storm can be incredibly difficult.
Some samples of suspicious-looking sediments along the coasts of New Jersey and Long Island have been found by the researchers as well, and they hope to find more of the same strange minerals pointing to an impact origin.
This video from Discovery.com shows how a 65-foot wave could inundate New York City.
/mark
A 65 foot wave washing over New Yawk? All those Obama voters washed away...
...wouldn’t that kind of be like flushing a huge toilet?
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bttt
Was Bristol Hit By A Tsunami? (1607)
Science Daily | 4-30-2007 | University Of Chicago
Posted on 04/30/2007 4:14:31 PM PDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1826205/posts
Tsunami’s eerie warning sign
New York Daily News | 12/28/04 | William Sherman
Posted on 12/28/2004 1:48:01 AM PST by kattracks
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1309438/posts
Worst disaster for the east coast of the US is for the underwater volcanic shelf to break off at the Canary Islands, other than a novel or two about a madmans attempt to make it let go prematurely it would create a tsunami a hundred feet tall that would wipe out everything from Newfoundland to Cuba and most of the Caribbean.
The risk of a landslide in the Canary Islands causing a tidal wave (tsunami) able to devastate America's east coast is vastly overstated.
That is the view of marine geologists studying ancient landslides in the area.
In typical Canary Island landslides, chunks of land break off in bits, not in one dramatic plunge, they argue.
[snip]
This is an old topic.
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