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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kumar who wrote (92919)	12/30/2004 3:58:52 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 793770

Hi Kumar. What's really scary is that this was a trivial little wave compared with what's coming into the Pacific Ocean one of these days thanks to an incoming bolide. One as big as the Tunguska one would make a large splash. Here's a photo of the average size - they come in various sizes, with 20km craters on Saturn's moon, Rhea, being common with one biggie at 150 km across. So 90% of impacts would be less than 15 km across. phy.mtu.edu That's enough to make a very big wave, sufficient to remove Los Angeles, Tokyo, Tientsin, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tauranga, Mount Maunganui, Whakatane, much of Auckland and a LOT more besides. How many would you say would be killed by a 50 metre wave across the Pacific Ocean rim? 200 million? I figure that living within 50 vertical metres of sea level is not worthwhile. The current mania-pricing of beachfront property seems insane to me. We live about 70 metres high, with the Waitakere range providing good western protection and Coromandel peninsular, Great Barrier Island, Rangitoto and stuff giving good Pacific protection. People seem to think splashes are uncommon. I don't think they are. It's only in the last century that people would have even seen Pacific Ocean meteors and tsunamis have been around forever. Records 500 years ago wouldn't be all that good. The cause wouldn't have been known. Japan perhaps has reasonable records of tsunamis over the centuries, at least for 1000 years, if not 2000. Anyway, the frequency of various size impacts should be well-established by now. Google probably knows. Hopefully, people will take this disaster as a warning to treat the ocean as an unstable surface to be kept well clear of. Hopefully too, we'll hear less about greenhouse warming causing a sea level rise of two metres over 100 years or something. It's the rapid sea level rises which matter. This is like the box-cutter hijacking of airliners. It was obvious that cockpit doors shouldn't be left open. They shut the cockpit doors after the horse had bolted. It's obvious that tsunamis will kill mega numbers of people living near the surface of the ocean. When people have 3G CDMA 1xEV-DO cyberphones, rapid warnings will be easily given, by MediaFLO for example. A splashdown over the Pacific could be notified in minutes and people with high ground nearby would be able to get clear. If their houses and other assets are high enough, they won't get much of a problem. Mqurice