The Wave

by Susan Casey

  McGuire’s stock in trade was what he referred to as “Gee-Gees,” short for global geophysical events. To qualify for this designation, a natural disaster had to have a widespread and fearsome impact. It had to rattle societies and upend economies and claim enormous numbers of victims. In his lineup of double-barreled catastrophes McGuire had a lot to say about waves, unimaginably large waves.

  The receptionist rang McGuire’s extension and he came downstairs. I was disappointed because I had hoped to see his office, imagining it as a kind of preapocalyptic mission control with satellite feeds, cyclone statistics, and real-time seismographic readings flashing across wall-size digital maps. As for McGuire himself, I guess I had envisioned him as a brooding character. In reality, the man who showed up in the reception area was buoyant, with light hazel eyes and a round, bemused face. He wore faded jeans, a striped button-down shirt, and small glasses with pale frames. As we walked to one of the college’s canteens for lunch, I found it hard to reconcile McGuire’s cheery presence with the subjects of his research, things that might have come straight from the Book of Revelation: volcanic explosions, asteroid strikes, million-fatality earthquakes, and thousand-foot megatsunamis thundering across entire ocean basins. It would be comforting to write him off, but McGuire’s credentials made that impossible. Crackpots weren’t often invited to speak at Lloyd’s of London or run respected research groups or publish scientific papers in Nature.

  We turned into a Gothic building that could have been a library or a lecture hall but in fact was a pub. “I think I’ll have a pint,” McGuire said, settling into a chair. I ordered one too, and when the waitress brought them over, I made a toast. “Here’s to being here,” I said, “and not underwater or something.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” McGuire said flatly, taking a drink.

  Early in his career McGuire, a postgrad geology student, had been hoping to work on the Mars Viking Lander program, but a posting in Sicily studying Mount Etna sold him on volcanology instead: “It was three years of eating pasta and drinking lots of red wine.” After that he was deployed to Montserrat, a British territory in the Caribbean West Indies where a volcano called Soufrière Hills sprang violently to life in 1995 after three centuries of dormancy. British volcanologists were in short supply, and McGuire found himself the senior scientist at Soufrière during its most dramatic eruptions, one of which happened on his second day there. “If it had been any bigger, we’d have all been dead,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going on. We were just incredibly lucky.”

  Soufrière belched out lava fountains and yellow-gray clouds of sulfur that choked the air. It sent pyroclastic dervishes of ash, gas, and burning rocks hurtling down the volcano at one hundred miles per hour. Eruptions buried the capital city, Plymouth, under forty feet of mud and turned the day as black as night. Instead of rainfall there was “ashfall.” The island’s vegetation died, as did nineteen people who didn’t get out of the volcano’s way fast enough. When Soufrière started its engines, life as Montserrat’s inhabitants knew it ended. The fabric of the little society, its tourist trade, its economy, its way of life, all were smothered under a red-hot blanket. For McGuire, it was a graphic lesson in just how destructive nature could be.

  Unless you’ve been through it, this level of mayhem is an abstraction, a nightmare that lodges itself in a dark corner of your mind but never really gets taken seriously. Despite detailed accounts of outlandish catastrophes from recent centuries, there’s a collective amnesia about them. As the global population clusters along the coastlines, the cautionary tales of the past—the oceans that were three hundred feet higher, the lost civilizations, the sunken islands, the redrawn maps—are long forgotten. “We have yet to experience the blind terror of being faced with a sea wave higher than a cathedral,” McGuire wrote. “Consequently these threats have no meaning for us on a daily basis.” Yet it was only 124 years ago that Krakatoa, a volcanic island perched between Java and Sumatra, blew its top and partially collapsed, creating a 140-foot tsunami that struck at eighty miles per hour, wiped out 165 villages, killed 36,000 people, and barely slowed down. (The first report of the disaster was a Morse code message sent by a Lloyd’s agent stationed on Java.)

  So few people have ever seen or documented the epicenter of a huge tsunami—or lived to tell about it—that it’s hard to envision how it happens or what it is. Contrary to the way it’s usually described, a tsunami consists not of a single, malefic wave but of a series of them. Generated by earthquakes and landslides that thrust the water vertically upward or downward, it’s an immense spasm of energy that reaches all the way to the ocean floor, and when it hits land it unleashes everything it’s got. “The surface of the sea had a terrible, writhing, coiling awfulness to it,” one Krakatoa witness described, adding, “I am convinced the Day of Judgment has come.”

  You don’t have to go back very far in history to find even more calamitous incidents. McGuire points to an event, pegged to around A.D. 365 and known by the disquieting name “The Early Byzantine Tectonic Paroxysm,” during which earthquakes thrust country-size hunks of land thirty feet in the air, generating a tsunami that steamrolled much of the eastern Mediterranean coastline. In his book Apocalypse, he writes: “There is absolutely no reason why such a readjustment of the complex Mediterranean geology could not occur again.”

  In 2000 McGuire noted in a newspaper column that things had been eerily quiet on the tsunami front, predicting that this would change, particularly in Indonesia. Four years later he was proved horribly right: a magnitude 9.1 earthquake tore across 740 miles of the Indian Ocean near Sumatra, punching a piece of the seafloor sixty-six feet upward and tearing open a thirty-three-foot rift. The quake—estimated to have contained the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-style atomic bombs—shook for a full ten minutes, setting in motion a hundred-foot tsunami that obliterated the city of Banda Aceh on Sumatra’s northwestern tip (the closest city to the quake’s epicenter) and then continued on at a smaller, but still devastating, forty feet to other parts of Indonesia, India, and Africa. The three main waves killed 240,000 people, left two million homeless in more than a dozen countries, and destroyed everything in their path. “I have been in war, and I have been through other relief operations,” then–Secretary of State Colin Powell said, visibly shaken. “But I have never seen anything like this.” He wasn’t alone. The waves’ power caught the world by shocking surprise.

  “Tsunamis are no ordinary waves,” McGuire said with understatement. “They are walls of water that just keep coming in. If it’s one hundred feet high, it’s going to be one hundred feet high for five minutes.” As rare and unlikely as they sound, tsunamis—a Japanese word that loosely translates to “harbor waves,” because they become visible only when they near land—are as inevitable as hurricanes or floods. The Pacific Ocean alone produced nearly a thousand in the past century. Depending on the geological event that caused it, a tsunami can measure anywhere from an inch to more than a mile high when it stampedes ashore. Japan has been walloped twenty-five times in the past four hundred years, with deaths in the hundreds of thousands. Tsunamis every bit as powerful as the one in 2004 have inundated America’s west coast sixteen times over the past ten thousand years, most recently in 1700. Smaller waves—still lethal and destructive—appear in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Hawaii far more often. Which is not surprising when you consider that the Pacific basin, a patchwork quilt of tectonic plates grinding against one another, is an earthquake factory.

  When a quake or a volcanic eruption does more than jostle the seafloor, when its motion causes an underwater landslide or shakes loose a chunk of coastline or glacier, the resulting waves can measure not in the hundreds but in the thousands of feet. Though we don’t often think of them this way, the oceans are filled with mountain ranges, trillions of tons of underwater rock and lava that shift around as time goes on. Volcanic islands—piles of loosely aggregated material heaped up by successive eruptions—are especially precarious. The steeper
they grow above the water, the faster the ocean erodes them from beneath, and eventually they all topple over. “They’ve detected seventy huge collapses in Hawaii,” McGuire said. “There are tsunami deposits on the islands that show that the waves have been at least 170 meters [550 feet] high.”

  Fortunately this cycle takes place over millions of years, and only the most paranoid among us would actively fear such a disaster. But if you wanted to bet on which volcanic island would next crumple into the sea, McGuire has a contender for you: La Palma, in the Canary Islands. It’s the steepest island in the world, and one of the most volcanically active—not a comforting combination—and lately its Cumbre Vieja volcano has been demonstrating some fairly alarming behavior. It has erupted seven times, most recently in 1971, and is poised for an eighth. What’s more, previous eruptions have already caused a west-facing section of land to drop fifteen feet lower than the rest of the island. The two sections are divided by a fissure, a weak spot where the rock has split. When McGuire’s colleague, British geologist Simon Day, came to take a closer look, he found even more bad news: the twenty-thousand-foot volcano itself was bisected by a fault line, and the inside of the crater was loaded with water. “Volcanoes act like giant sponges,” Day explained, “and that weight creates an unstable situation.” When magma is present its heat turns that water into steam, which can then blow apart sections of rock. If Cumbre Vieja’s next eruption triggers a slide, this house-of-cards island could shed its entire western flank—about thirteen miles long and ten miles wide, a mile thick, and weighing approximately 500 billion tons.

  When Day analyzed his research, he was stunned: the model showed that when this land dropped into the ocean, the resulting splash wave would be three thousand feet high and generate a tsunami that would hit the Canaries, the northwest coast of Africa, southern Europe, the U.K., the Caribbean, North and South America. By the time it arrived at the U.S. East Coast nine hours later, the wave would still top one hundred feet.

  While McGuire and I talked the lunch crowd poured in, though it was clear no one had come for the food. I glanced at a tray of brick-heavy meat pies and hot dogs curling under a heat lamp and ordered another Guinness. McGuire did the same. “The earth fights back is what I tend to say,” he said. “Climate change is the greatest Gee-Gee of all time. If we don’t tackle that, we’re not going to be in any position to tackle the rest of it.” While he acknowledged the impact of increased storminess—“Wave heights around the U.K. have increased by about a third in the last few decades”—McGuire emphasized that climate change has additional wave-generating effects that few people are aware of. “If you start to see meter-scale [3.3-foot] rises in sea level, then that load starts to bend the [earth’s] crust, and that would promote magma reaching the surface. That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot.” As bizarre as this sounds, history—and other scientists—back up his theory. “Many potentially hazardous geological systems are sensitive to changes in currents, sea level, and atmospheric pressure,” NASA geophysicist Dr. Jeanne Sauber said in a New Scientist article. “It’s unavoidable that glacial retreat will induce tectonic activity.”

  Sitting calmly in his chair, sipping at his pint, McGuire spoke about Florida being underwater, an asteroid splashing down in the ocean (now there would be a wave), and an earthquake wiping out Tokyo. The Caribbean (particularly Puerto Rico) and the U.S. Pacific Northwest were probably overdue for tsunami-inducing quakes. “It’s complicated,” he said, “but generally speaking, if you warm the earth up very, very rapidly, and you’re pumping more energy into the weather machine, you’re going to see more dynamic events of all types. It’s exciting, actually.” He laughed nervously, and then corrected himself. “Probably not the right word, exciting.”

  Earlier McGuire had mentioned his four-year-old son, Fraser. I wondered how he balanced his fears of runaway climate change and wrath-of-God natural disasters with his hopes for Fraser’s future. “Well, I think his life will be much harder than mine has been,” McGuire said matter-of-factly. An introspective look came over his face. “The world is undoubtedly going to be a much more difficult place for him when he grows up.” He paused. “People ask me how I sleep at night,” he said. “And I tell them, ‘Like anybody else.’ I can’t lie there thinking, ‘Oh my God, there might be a supereruption tonight.’ It’s not human nature. But in the daytime I will consider things like that.”

  Despite his dire prognostications, McGuire considered himself an “optimistic pessimist.” The idea of being a “prophet of doom,” frankly, bummed him out. As he saw it, what he was doing was simply pointing out the facts: it may not happen tomorrow or even ten thousand years from now, but this stuff does happen. A mile-high asteroid wave erupting in the Pacific—it wasn’t something he’d made up. Those sunken, blasted-out volcanic craters that dotted the oceans? At one point they had looked a lot like Hawaii.

  I had a hard enough time envisioning even a hundred-foot wave, I told McGuire. How on earth do you conjure up a wave ten or twenty times that size in your mind’s eye? Landslide-induced giant waves, he explained, trying to give me the picture, didn’t start off looking like waves. They were more like aquatic mushroom clouds. “The water just sort of bubbles up into a wave,” he said with a chuckle. “It isn’t something you’d forget.” A mile-high wave seemed completely otherworldly, except that it wasn’t. In fact, there was a place in North America that specialized in generating them. And there were three people alive who, in a manner of speaking, had surfed one.

  YOU’RE PLAYING WITH THE EDGE HERE.

  Big-wave surfer Jeff Clark

  HALF MOON BAY, CALIFORNIA

  Hamilton’s storm prediction proved right. As December began, the weather radar screens pulsated with the mightiest magenta blob anyone had seen in years, as a mammoth disturbance snaked its way across the North Pacific. A cold low-pressure system had joined forces with a warm low-pressure system, the extra heat and moisture whipping the two storms into one howling monster. “The Northern Hemisphere is going absolutely ballistic right now,” Surfline reported. (Similar furies were also under way in the North Atlantic, with fifty-foot waves lashing the coasts of Ireland, England, France, and Spain.) Sometimes the magenta blobs started off like they meant business only to fade in the end, but for giant wave potential this storm looked solid. There was only one problem: it might be a little too solid. Conditions might be too haywire for the waves to be rideable. This was a full-on cyclone and it was traveling from an unusual direction, west-southwest. Typically the North Pacific storms rumbled down from the Bering Sea at a northwesterly angle. This one had dipped farther south and looked like it would largely sidestep Hawaii, barreling directly toward northern California and Oregon. A huge swell was coming, that much was clear, but the wind conditions would determine whether the waves were mad, messy heaps of water or the glassy clean skyscrapers that big-wave surfers dream of.

  Forecaster Sean Collins monitored satellite and buoy readings, wind speeds, wave spectra, and model predictions, considered the numbers, and consulted LOLA—Surfline’s custom computer model that filters sea state data through a surfing prism. He arrived at his verdict late on December 2: the swell’s most desirable waves would be found at a northern California break called Ghost Tree, on the morning of December 4. E-mails went out, plane tickets were booked, Jet Skis were corralled, and from Hawaii to Brazil to South Africa, the riders snapped into action.

  I had been traveling when I heard about the swell, headed to Los Angeles from the East Coast. From L.A. I caught the last flight to San Francisco on December 3, planning to drive the 125 miles south to Ghost Tree the next morning before dawn. The break, improbably located about a three-iron shot off the eighteenth hole at Pebble Beach, the famous golf course near Carmel, was named after a dead cypress husk on nearby Pescadero Point. Among big-wave connoisseurs, Ghost Tree wasn’t especially beloved. It didn’t break th
at often, and when it did it lunged open in a maniac sneer, spitting foam and tangled rafts of kelp. A minefield of rocks fringed its base, leaving surfers no margin for error. Boils, seething disturbances in the water that indicated a shallowly hidden obstacle beneath, burbled up all over the place. Ghost Tree was a monster truck of a wave, huge and showy and growly but not especially comfortable to ride. It had one advantage for this storm, however: the deepwater canyon that created the wave was ideally angled to capture a west swell.

  I called Hamilton to see what he was planning, but his cell phone had clicked straight to voice mail: “Due to the submersion of my phone, I no longer have your number,” his message said. Cell phones didn’t last very long around Hamilton. They got crushed under the wheels of trucks or forgotten at the hardware store or lost in the pineapple fields or, it appeared, dropped into the ocean. I left a message but wasn’t sure when I would hear from him: Gabby Reece, now fully nine months pregnant, was due to have their baby any day. It seemed unlikely that he would consider leaving Hawaii right now.

  Even if he hadn’t been awaiting the arrival of his third child, Hamilton was not typically a participant in the seat-of-the-pants global big-wave hunt that kicked into Amazing Race mode whenever a promising magenta blob showed up. Tahiti was an exception; he had a special connection to the wave, a support system in place, and a couple of Jet Skis stashed on the island. “Chasing the rabbit is a tricky game,” he’d told me one time, explaining his philosophy. “You really don’t want to get into that at a certain point. You’re gonna be looking over there when it’s over here and running around half-cocked and unprepared when it does happen.” His usual strategy was to stay put, in the location that was most likely to pay off over time: “There’s a reason why surfing began in Hawaii, you know.”