![]() HSU faculty scientists and students are pioneering research in an academic discipline scarcely known a generation ago: paleotsunami science. Humboldt State University is taking the lead in the 23-campus California State University system to gather the data necessary to understand the state’s tsunami risks better. Readying for future tsunami onslaughts requires a thorough understanding of what has happened long ago. Might there be some way to predict Great Tsunamis, however inexactly, which destroy lives by the thousands in near-countless numbers in a gigantic spasm? Could scientists develop a method for establishing the prehistorical recurrence of tsunamis across centuries of time along the California coast? ![]() It is one of a number of places along the Pacific Northwest littoral where tribes have similar communal memories. Oral history accounts of the Yurok people suggest that water heights of nearly 60 feet deluged that section of the Redwood Coast in the distant past. The Orick scenario is not imaginary, either. ![]() Paleoseismologists were aware of it, but civic planners didn’t build to it. ![]() Such devastation had ripped through Japan before, albeit hundreds of years ago, in 869 A.D. Their vaunted seawalls afforded as much protection as tissue paper. ![]() Salt water explodes in a gigantic onrush against the coast, pulverizing the community of Orick and the Redwood Park Information Center as it engulfs everything inland with devastating speed, over expanses no one foresaw. ![]()
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