Tsunami makes it to Bay Area (see photo)

sfgate.com ^ | 3/11/11 | Steven Winter

[GSWarrior]

Wow!

Same photo here. It takes a short to load the above page.

http://imgs.sfgate.com/blogs/images/sfgate/inberkeley/2011/03/11/Tsunami600x336.jpg

[the invisib1e hand]

LOL!!!

[Glenn]

I gotta go pee.

[Eye of Unk]

Hey its SF, if its queer its normal, right?

[blueplum]

low tide in SF - they lucked out

[funfan]

Great picture—now if we could only find Mothra

[Carry_Okie]

Diffraction in action.

[Carry_Okie]

That picture is a bore!

And if that pun was bad, the prize goes to anybody who knows why seismic waves are named "tsunamis" and what that word literally means.

[rockinqsranch]

“Imagine the force necessary off Japan to cause the Pacific Ocean to “splash” like that in San Francisco.”

Good observation. I’d like to add that in comparison it takes a containership on average about 14 days to get to Japan. This Tsunami arrived in little over that many hours.

[txhurl]

'tsu' = run
'nami' = the other way

[Hot Tabasco]

How many victims?

Victims? The question that needs to be asked is if there were any survivors........

[GSWarrior]

That picture is a bore!

Feel free to post a more exciting picture of a tsunami surge making its way through San Francisco Bay.

; }

[Frantzie]

Pretty area - shame about the people.

[Publius6961]

Bookmark

[Carry_Okie]

The form of the long wave in the picture as it proceeds up a channel is referred by oceanologists as a "bore." The most common cause is extreme tidal differences operating in a narrow channel. Among the tidal bores of the world, there is often one in Tomales Bay nearby, the Bay of Fundy, up the Amazon channel, etc. Tidal bores have a form very similar to what is depicted in the photo.

It was a pun son.

As to origin of the word, "tsunami," when American scientists realized that "tidal waves" had nothing to do with tides, they decided they would adopt the Japanese word, in the belief that the Japanese were more "scientific" about such things. Little did they know that the English translation for the Japanese word is... "tidal wave." The term stuck anyway and has become a huge joke among the oceanographic literati. The correct term is now, "seismic wave."

[telebob]

I had the opportunity to observe the tsunami effect this morning from my home in Alameda. I live right on the bay front and we had about three complete tide cycles in the space of about an hour. It was really something.

Out in the middle bay there were four ships anchored. Three were swinging to a flood tide and one was swinging to an ebb. I’ve never seen that before, ever.

[telebob]

Per my post above, here’s a YouTube link to a video someone shot along the Alameda shoreline showing the speed of the surge advance:

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