Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 6, 1995 TAG: 9504070002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A: We'd like that to happen just so we could see the screaming headlines in the tabs. We can imagine TSUNAMI OF DOOM, or perhaps ALL WASHED UP, or WAVE GOODBYE, or even the rather playful SEA YA! (Meanwhile, in The New York Times: Infrastructure Damage Considerable In Surf Event/Panel To Study Coastal Bathymetry).
The entire East Coast is pretty much free of tsunamis. The reason is that the Atlantic Ocean has hardly any ``subduction zones.'' A subduction zone is a trench in the ocean floor where one plate of the Earth's crust is sliding beneath another. The Pacific is full of these trenches.
Subduction isn't a smooth business - it's jerky - and the resulting earthquakes send a shock wave of tremendous energy through the ocean. It's like someone detonated hundreds of atomic bombs. The energy creates a wave that, out in the middle of the ocean, is only a few inches high at the surface. But the wave energy is thousands of feet deep, speeding across the ocean at 500 miles an hour. As it nears the shore it is slowed by friction, but the energy is also compressed into a shallower and shallower slice of water, until finally it hits land, having risen as much as 30 feet.
It's not just the size of the wave, it's the speed. At impact it can be going as fast as a locomotive.
Almost the entire Pacific Rim has these subduction zones, but not California, where the North American and Pacific plates are sliding past one another at the San Andreas Fault. So Los Angeles and San Francisco aren't really in the tidal wave cross hairs.
The dominant feature of the Atlantic Ocean floor is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is where two plates of crust are moving apart, with new crust extruded in the center. The Eurasian plate moves east, the North American plate moves west. Some earthquakes result but they make pretty feeble tidal waves, says Kenji Satake, assistant professor of geology at the University of Michigan.
Still, there have been Atlantic tidal waves that have hit the East Coast. We have the list. The biggest one was Nov. 18, 1929, when an earthquake registering 7.2 on the Richter scale, centered on the Grand Banks, sent a huge tidal wave crashing into Newfoundland, killing 26 people.
And yes, New York City was almost hit by a tsunami on May 19, 1964. The origin of the event is unknown, but might have been a landslide or explosion under the sea off the coast of Montauk, Long Island. The coast from Rhode Island to New Jersey was hit with a tidal wave.
But it was not exactly fearsome.
In fact it was only a foot high.
NEW YORK CITY SMASHED BY WAVELET. You probably missed that story altogether.
The Mailbag:
Martha W. of McLean, Va., asks, ``Why don't Barney Google of `Barney Google and Snuffy Smith' and Judge Parker of `Judge Parker' appear in the comic strips bearing their name?''
Dear Martha: They do show up, occasionally. But they've lost control of their own strips. They were outmoded. They had their day and there's no going back.
First we spoke to Woody Wilson, who took over the Judge Parker and Rex Morgan, M.D., strips when their creator, Dr. Nick Dallis, died in 1991. Dallis started Judge Parker in 1952, but he faded away in the 1960s as the strip's focus shifted to a young lawyer, Sam Driver, and the beautiful millionairess, Abbey Spencer. As for the judge, says Wilson, ``He just got too distinguished to be running around chasing bad guys. And he sort of got retired.''
Next we called up Fred Lasswell, who first started working on ``Barney Google'' in 1934 and took over for good in 1942. The strip was created by Billy DeBeck in 1919. Barney Google was a racetrack guy, with a horse named Spark Plug. Snuffy Smith came along in '34, a walk-on character. When DeBeck died, Lasswell felt he couldn't do a strip based on sports and shifted the focus to the shiftless Snuffy.
``Since I was sort of a hayseed, a country type guy, I leaned more toward the Snuffy characters,'' says Lasswell.
The strip, which is still officially called ``Barney Google and Snuffy Smith,'' is in more than 900 papers now, he said - its popularity peaking after 75 years.
And Barney Google?
``He returns every millennium,'' says Lasswell. ``He's training Spark Plug to make a comeback.''
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB