© Credit: USGSHawaii's evacuation maps are based in part on the 1946 tsunami, the most destructive tsunami in Hawaii's recent history. But new research shows that mammoth tsunamis, many times the size of the 1946 event, have struck the island in the past, and may again in the future.
A mass of marine debris discovered in a giant sinkhole in the Hawaiian islands provides
evidence that at least one mammoth tsunami, larger than any in Hawaii's recorded history, has struck the islands, and that a similar disaster could happen again, new research finds. Scientists are reporting that a wall of water up to nine meters (30 feet) high surged onto Hawaiian shores
about 500 years ago. A 9.0-magnitude earthquake off the coast of the Aleutian Islands triggered the mighty wave, which left behind up to nine shipping containers worth of ocean sediment in a sinkhole on the island of Kauai.
The tsunami was at least three times the size of a 1946 tsunami that was the most destructive in Hawaii's recent history, according to the new study that examined deposits believed to have come from the extreme event and used models to show how it might have occurred. Tsunamis of this magnitude are rare events. An earthquake in the eastern Aleutian Trench big enough to generate a massive tsunami like the one in the study is expected to occur once every thousand years, meaning that there is a 0.1 percent chance of it happening in any given year - the same probability as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake that struck Japan, according to Gerald Fryer, a geophysicist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach, Hawaii.
Comment: We know extreme weather is the new normal, but the frequency of intense hail storms (among many other anomalous weather phenomena) hitting places that rarely see traces of milder variables, is hopefully enough to make more sit up straight and snap out of their normalcy bias. Our weather system seems to be heading towards an ice age, and these freakish hail storms are indicative of such a transition, see why: Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection