The Tsunami Countdown

NINETEEN

10:24 a.m.

58 Minutes to Wave Arrival Time

The horror of watching Dr. Aspen’s and Brent Featherstone’s deaths confirmed Kai’s nightmare scenario. “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, all right?” Kai yelled. He calmed himself, but his pulse was still racing. “It was just a guess based on Crawford and Mader’s research. I saw on the news that a TransPac jet went down somewhere over the Pacific. They showed a graphic of the plane going down in the exact same location as the earthquake.”

“So?”

“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 State Civil Defense. “Call Brian Renfro at HSCD. 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 with 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 HSCD. 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? Your 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 asked.

“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 because I wanted to confirm that the 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 say 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?”

“Yes. 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 it hit the earth, it’s a meteorite,” Reggie said.

“What are you, the language police?” Brad said. “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.

“Maybe it came out of the sun,” Reggie said.

“You mean they might have missed an asteroid big enough to cause a tsunami? I’d like to know who’s in charge of that screwup.”

“That’s not important now,” Kai said. “We’ll just have to assume it’s an asteroid impact and work from there.”

“Why does it even matter?” Brad said.

“Because if it was an impact, we don’t know how big the resulting tsunami would be when it reaches Hawaii. 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.”

Brad looked confused. Kai explained further, as much to help himself wrap his head around the scenario as for Brad’s benefit.

“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 the asteroid wasn’t detected before it hit, 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 approximate the magnitude of the resulting earthquake depending on the size of the asteroid. We’ll 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. Even the Johnston Island images only give us a minimum size.”

“The data from the DART buoy should give us an accurate reading,” Kai said.

“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 typical for those sources.

But there were no procedures for dealing with an asteroid-generated tsunami. 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 the computer. “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. “Four nine two five.”

“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, “if this model is anywhere close to being accurate, we’re in serious trouble.”

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

Reggie let out a heavy sigh. “At least seventy when it gets here.”

“Holy shit!” Brad said. “The Asian tsunami didn’t get bigger than thirty feet high, did it?”

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

Brad’s eyes goggled at the awe-inspiring thought. “So seventy feet will be huge.”

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. Seventy meters. The wave is going to be over two hundred feet high.”