Rogue Wave

Chapter 19

The horror of watching the death of Dr. Aspen and Brent Featherstone confirmed Kai's nightmare scenario. He shivered involuntarily from the chill that ran up his spine.

"What the hell is going on?" Brad said. Then he pointed at Kai with an accusing finger. "How did you know the tsunami would be so big?"

"I didn't know," Kai said. "It was just a guess. About an hour ago, I saw on Headline News that a TransPac jet went down somewhere over the Pacific. I didn't give it another thought. But ten minutes ago, I saw the same story. This time, they showed a graphic of the plane going down in the exact same location as the earthquake."

"So?"

"Given what we just saw, I don't think that it's a coincidence. Brad, since it's just me and Reggie here, I'm going to need your help. Call the FAA and find out exactly what the latitude and longitude was where they lost contact. And see if there were any other planes in the area. And don't take no for an answer."

"Why?"

"I'll explain when you're off the phone."

"But who do I call? It's a holiday."

"I don't know. There's got to be an emergency number. Here." Kai gave him the number for Hawaii Civil Defense. "Call Brian Renfro at HCD. Get the number from him. Tell him you're my brother."

Brad looked dubious, but he saw that Kai was serious and went into the other room to make the call.

"Kai," Reggie said, "do you know what the chances are of this happening?"

"I don't know. A million to one? But Reggie, what if it did happen? We've got no scenarios for dealing with it."

"If we're wrong about this and word gets out, we are going to be the laughingstock of the seismic community."

"I know, Reggie, but…" Kai tapped his watch. He didn't have to tell Reggie the clock was ticking. "I'm going to get on the phone to NASA and find out if they have any satellite data or photos from the site of our earthquake."

"And me?"

"Start doing a search of relevant papers in the Science of Tsunami Hazards. See if you can find that formula from Crawford and Mader."

"Gotcha."

Kai dialed Hawaii Civil Defense. Although the PTWC notified many different organizations throughout the Pacific about tsunami hazards, NASA was not one of them. Kai had no emergency number for them.

Brian Renfro picked up the phone on the other end.

"Brian, it's Kai Tanaka."

"Kai, what is going on? You're brother just called me asking for the number for the FAA."

"You gave it to him, right?"

"Sure, but that's a little weird, don't you think?"

"It's going to get weirder. Who would we call to get emergency satellite imagery?"

"Satellite imagery. Why do you need that?"

"I think the situation may be worse than we first imagined."

"Worse than a tsunami? Is there a hurricane coming, too?"

Brad came back in holding a slip of paper.

"Hold on, Brian" Kai said. To Brad, "That was fast."

"While I was on the phone, I looked at CNN's web site. They already had the latitude and longitude reported in the story."

He gave Kai the slip of paper with the coordinates. Kai gave it to Reggie, who took a red dot from the container and stuck it on the map at the indicated coordinates. It overlapped with the dot of the earthquake.

"Jesus!" said Reggie. "You've got to be kidding me."

"What do you think?" Kai said.

"I think I'm wrong about the seamount."

"Brian," Kai said. "It's worse than a hurricane." He told Renfro about the video of the disaster at Johnston Island.

"And Christmas Island?" Renfro said.

"It's probably completely wiped out. Brian, the reason I wanted Brad to call the FAA was to see if that TransPac flight went down at the same location as the earthquake."

"Why do you want to know that?"

Kai took a deep breath. It was the first time he'd said it out loud. "Because I think that we've had a meteor impact in the middle of the Pacific."

Renfro laughed. "Yeah, right." When Kai didn't laugh with him, he became silent. "You're serious?"

"That's the only explanation I can think of."

"You think satellite imagery can confirm it?"

"Right. Who is the best to call? NASA? They operate LANDSAT. How about NESDIS?" NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service operated the GOES weather satellites that were used for all of the nation's hurricane forecasting.

"They're a good place to start," Renfro said. "I'll patch you in when I get someone on the line."

With that, he hung up.

"Wait a minute!" Brad said. "What did you just say? A meteor?"

"Actually, if you want to be technically accurate," said Reggie, "if it hit the earth, it's a meteorite."

"What are you?" said Brad. "The language police? Who cares?" He turned to Kai. "Come on! If a meteor or meteorite or asteroid or whatever was heading toward us, it would have been big news all over the TV for months."

"Not if no one saw it coming," Kai said. Occasionally, they talked about tsunamis from asteroids in an off-hand way in the same way that other people might talk about the possibility of getting struck by lightning. It was a statistical possibility, but they didn't expect it to happen, not in their lifetimes. The conversations provided a good diversion and a few chuckles. Kai didn't think it was so funny now.

"I've read a few papers about it," Reggie said. "Interesting subject, actually. Did you know astronomers estimate that they've only found about 75 % of the asteroids in our solar system that are over one kilometer in diameter?"

"You mean, they might have missed an asteroid half a mile wide? I'd like to know who's in charge of that screw-up."

"First of all," Kai said, "we don't know it's an asteroid. However, that's the only tsunami source that fits our current situation. Second, even if it was an impact, we don't know how big the resulting tsunami would be. Asteroid impacts move water in a way completely different from earthquakes. That's why we need to get some data. Reggie's looking to see if he can find Crawford and Mader's latest projections."

Kai could see that Brad was confused, so he explained. It also helped him to wrap his brain around the scenario.

"Crawford and Mader are researchers at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. They wrote a series of papers about computer models they had developed predicting how big tsunamis from an asteroid impact would be. Of course, they had to make a lot of assumptions, like material density, velocity of the asteroid, and angle of impact. But part of their research estimated how big the tsunamis would be as a function of the distance from the impact point and the diameter of the asteroid."

"But if they didn't detect the asteroid before now, how can you know how big it is?" Brad was quick.

"Because we know how big the earthquake was and how deep the water is in that part of the ocean," Kai said. "They developed a formula that would tell you how big the resulting earthquake would be depending on the size of the asteroid. We'll just solve the formula in reverse based on the size of the quake. From that, we can estimate how big the waves would be at various distances from the impact zone."

"Fine," Brad said. "But how do you know they're right?"

"We don't," said Reggie. "We've never gotten seismic readings from an asteroid impact. There have been a lot of different papers written about asteroid-generated tsunamis, and the estimates are all over the map. At best, we can get a size range until we get some real data."

"Like from the DART buoy," Kai said. "That should give us a fairly accurate reading."

"So until then," Brad said, "you're guessing."

"Educated guessing. It's better than nothing."

"So if it is an asteroid, what do we do?"

Kai honestly didn't know. The PTWC had been founded to warn against tsunamis generated by earthquakes, the most frequent cause of Pacific-wide tsunamis that were a threat to Hawaii. Most of the dangerous quakes were centered in Alaska, Japan, or Chile, but tsunamis could also be generated locally by volcanic quakes and landslides. Tsunamis originating from the Pacific Rim would take five hours or more to get to the islands, leaving plenty of time to evacuate the coastline, even if it was extremely costly and time-consuming. Locally-generated tsunamis could arrive in a matter of minutes and were therefore much more dangerous. In either case, evacuation routes and procedures had been carefully planned out based on the size of tsunamis that those sources would generate.

But there were no procedures for dealing with an asteroid-generated tsunami. No evacuation routes. No civil defense plans. It was just too unlikely to spend the PTWC's limited time and resources on.

"I've got the formula," said Reggie. He started tapping it into Mathematica, a powerful computer program they used for these kinds of calculations. "So let's see. We registered an earthquake of 6.9. What's the depth of the ocean at that location?"

Using a map of the Pacific Ocean floor, Kai sounded out each digit to make sure Reggie understood. "4925."

"Got it." Reggie continued typing. "And now I just type in how far we are from the epicenter, and that should give us a ballpark height of the biggest wave."

When he was finished, he leaned forward and looked confused. Then his eyes widened suddenly, and he pulled his hands back from the keyboard as if it were hot.

"What is it?" Brad said.

"Maybe I did the calculation wrong." Reggie started over and typed all of the numbers in again. When he saw the results, he leaned back and shook his head.

"Oh man," Reggie said, his tone thick with sarcasm, "you are going to love this."

"How big?" Kai asked, already knowing that it was beyond his worst fears.

Reggie let out a heavy sigh. "At least 70."

"Holy shit!" Brad said. There was fear in his eyes, but he also had the slightest smile. Kai could understand the mixture of dread and excitement he was feeling. Despite the terrible devastation from the massive waves, despite the danger, despite the illogic of it, Kai had always wanted to see a tsunami in person. Now he was going to get his chance.

"The Asia tsunami didn't get bigger than 30 feet high, did it?" Brad asked.

Reggie shook his head. "There are some estimates that it got at least twice that high in Banda Aceh."

"So 70 feet will be huge," he said.

Kai put his hand on Brad's shoulder. He didn't get it.

"Brad, all of our figures are in metric units. Meters, not feet. 70 meters. The wave is going to be over 200 feet high."