Throughout the week, I kept remembering the 1964 tsunami along the West Coast. The waves ranged from a high of 67 metres near Valdez, to barely noticeable ripples on a beach. I lived in Kitimat, British Columbia, close enough to the epicentre that we felt the earthquake, but there was no tsunami racing up Douglas Channel to smash into our beach.
Why is that? It depends, as I wrote in my column for CBC.ca, on the luck of the fjord and what scientists call the "natural oscillation frequency" of the fjord.
You can read the column: Tsunami '64: The luck of the fjord on the West Coast.
My plans to work on the book during the week between Christmas and New Year's were largely forgotten. As the news got worse from the rim of the Indian Ocean, there was more and more work to do; creating photo galleries, watching for new satellite images of the areas hit by the tsunami, trying to sort the pictures sent in by readers — some were genuine; others were not. Luckily they were caught.
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8:19 PM posted by Robin Rowland
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