Tsunami Hit New York City Region In 300 BC

Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists say that sedimentary deposits from more than 20 cores in New York and New Jersey indicate a huge wave crashed into the New York City region 2,300 years ago, dumping sediment and shells across Long Island and New Jersey and casting wood debris far up the Hudson River. Steven Goodbred, an Earth scientist at Vanderbilt University, says that size and distribution of material would require a high velocity wave and strong currents to move it, and it is unlikely that short bursts produced in a storm would suffice. 'If we're wrong, it was one heck of a storm,' says Goodbred. An Atlantic tsunami is rare but not inconceivable, says Neal Driscoll, a geologist from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who is not associated with the research. The 1929 Grand Banks tsunami in Newfoundland killed more than two dozen people and snapped many transatlantic cables, and was set in motion by a submarine landslide set off by an earthquake."

Re:Could happen again

[Bandman]

You're talking about La Palma [wikipedia.org].

And yea, no one is really sure what will happen when it goes into the sea. It depends a great deal on how it goes, I suppose.

My money is on Yellowstone violently erupting, which shakes apart La Palma.

Which gets the attention of the martians...

Re:Could happen again

[Smitty825]

You're probably thinking about the Cumbre Vieja [wikipedia.org] volcano, which is located off of the coast of Africa, and is believed to potentially cause a super-tsunami in the Atlantic.

Re:Good news for the young earthers..

[Ginger Unicorn]

Second virtually every culture in the world has a record of a flood circa 8000 BC, from the Jews to the Eqyptians the Iraqis, Indians, and Chinese.

citation please? some cultures have flood myths but where did you get the idea that they all pin the date down to circa 8000BC? and how circa is circa? Indeed the dates seem to be all over the place [wikipedia.org]. They also seem to involve their cultures surviving the flood, which isn't much use to people trying to prop up the Genesis flood story. Unless noah's family traveled the globe restablishing exact replicas all the cultures of the world and then carried on as if nothing had happened. Presumably noah had at least one black kid, and one asian kid, etc.

Re:Good news for the young earthers..

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Race, gender, nation of origin -- all of those are things that are outside of our control. If I'm a black woman from Italy or a white man from South Africa, those are unchangeable facts. Beliefs are not put to the same standard. Prejudice against an innate characteristic is wrong.

Prejudice against a belief is different. People who believe, defend and hold an opinion that is poorly supported, leads to incorrect conclusions should be subject to criticism and judgment. See: politics, science, anything involving theories.

Hawking, Einstein do/did not believe in god in any relevant sense. They use(d) "God" as an equivalent for "Nature", something natural, fundamental -- something disconnected from humankind but true to the utmost. Calling them believers or theists is an abuse of terms. "God" in a religious sense is a deity who created the universe, interacts with it, and is worthy (or necessary) of worship. That is not what those men believe.

By your standards of "God", I can prove horses can fly. By defining a horse as a bird.

As an Einstein quote.. "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses...the Jewish religion[,] like all other religions[,] is an incarnation of the most childish superstition"

Re:so this is what happened when atlantis sank ..

[Z00L00K]

Never mind that - Atlantis seems to have been on Santorini in the Mediterranean, the rest is just speculation.

What's more interesting is that if it has happened once it can happen again. Living by the coast is a blessing but also a curse. Living inland has it's good and bad sides too. More extreme temperature differences between winter and summer, but less risk for severe storms except for some areas that suffers tornadoes.

So even if the ocean makes living easier it also comes with risk. But people are living there as well as on volcanoes and other dangerous places. The reason is that it happens so infrequently that the risk of dying is relatively low compared to many other risks.

Re:This isn't a new worry

[u38cg]

Well, indeed. A tsunamai hitting that part of the world would be, say, 200km long, very approximately. In open water, a tsunami is approximately a meter or so tall and travels at circa 1000km/h. So, roughly speaking, we have 0.5*((200km*pi*1m^2)*1000kg/m^3)*((1000km/s)^2)= pi*10^20 Joules. Now a megaton, roughly speaking, is 4.184*10^15 Joules. So, to deal with our posited tsunami, we will need pi*10^20/4.184*10^15 megatons of nuke, that is, around 75 000 megatons. The Tsar Bomba, the largest device ever tested, yielded 50 megatons. So, we would need some 1500 Tsar Bombas (or 750 if the theoretical maximum yield can be squeezed out of them). However, sadly for firework fans everywhere, the Soviet Union discontinued these highly useful devices, and so we are left with the current arsenal, which generally have a typical yield of 1.2 megatons or less. This means in turn we need some 63000 nuclear weapons. After START II, however the US reduced its arsenal to around 2200 in active deployment. In other words, learn to swim, boy!.