Chapters (63)
A tsunami can travel at 500 miles per hour, as fast as a commercial jet.
The tallest tsunami ever recorded was in Alaska. It was 100 feet.
Rossby Waves, which aren’t tsunamis, just large-scale ocean waves, take roughly 221 days to cross an ocean. A tsunami? One day. Sometimes less than one day.
Tsunamis rush the shore at the speed of a major league pitcher’s fastball. Faster, even.
They’re caused by underwater earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or other explosions under the ocean’s surface, movement in glaciers—even meteorites crashing down from space.
Many survivors report that a tsunami sounds like a freight train and that the water is gray-brown because it’s churning up the ocean floor.
The water is full of all sorts of things:
- Metal
- Pieces of buildings
- Cars
- Shards of glass
- Toys
- Palm trees
- Beach umbrellas
- Gold watches
- Cell phones
- Bathing suit tops
- My parents
It takes eight to ten minutes to drown in seawater. Fresh water is two to three minutes. You die from cardiac arrest. I didn’t know that. I thought it was your lungs filling with water, but it’s your heart that gives out. That gives up.
For the past seventeen minutes and thirty-two seconds, I have been on a mental EVA—Extravehicular Activity, more commonly referred to by laypersons as a space walk.
It is ten years in the future, and I am on the International Space Station, scrunched into a tiny window seat.
There’s a bright blue line on the horizon, mixing with the emerald smoky green of the aurora that swirls over Earth’s surface like a potion in a cauldron—another sunrise, one of the sixteen I get to see up here every day on the ISS. Since we orbit Earth every ninety-two minutes, that means sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. How’s that for a life?
We race toward it, toward the light, and neon cerulean turns to blinding gold as the sun rises over the east, spilling across the beaches of Malaysia right below us.
Up here, I can just make out the rocky coastline of the islands, edged by white sand, green water giving way to the darkest blue of the ocean. A raft of clouds floats by, covering my view, and then we’re speeding past those beaches, heading toward our next sunset.