Scientists have found the biggest tsunami ever measured! It occurred on July 9, 1958 in Lituya Bay, Alaska. Triggered by an earthquake of 7.5 magnitudes, the tsunami itself was eventually created by a landslide.
Astonishingly, the wave produced by the tsunami was 1,720 feet high! Compared to the Sears Tower in Chicago, it was almost 300 feet taller – which is taller than any building in the world! It was about 350 feet taller than the World Trade Center in New York City was!
A witness, who observed it from a fishing boat explained the phenomenon,
Big chunks of ice were falling off the face of (the glacier) and falling into the water. They came off the glacier like a big load of rocks spilling out of a dump truck.
It was since October, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Hermann Fritz, has been in Corvallis for conducting experiments in the tsunami wave basin at OSU, with the OSU laboratory being the world’s largest for studying the effects of tsunamis.
Funded by the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, the research is part of the National Science Foundation.
Photo Credit: Gazette-Times