Despite his fidgeting Dennis was captivated by the old man’s tale of a winter’s night when the ground shook and a huge wave smashed into the shore at Pachena Bay. More than one hundred people were lost. “There is now no one left alive due to what this land does at times,” Nookmis said in a 1964 interview. “They simply had no time to get hold of canoes, no time to get awake.” A nearby settlement on high ground escaped damage.
Nookmis explained that the event happened four generations before his grandfather’s birth. That placed it sometime between 1640 and 1740—squarely in the time frame for the most recent megathrust quake. Several other stories fell in the same range, including an account collected in the early 1900s from an Oregon coast native. Her grandfather met a woman who broke her back falling from a tree where she took shelter in a great flood. A story recorded in the 1930s told of a village destroyed on Canada’s Queen Charlotte Strait. “This is not a myth,” the storyteller said. “My tale is seven generations old.”
“It was really shocking to discover how closely the dates matched,” Ludwin said.
What Dennis had considered a dusty legend came alive for him in 1964. The tsunami from Alaska’s magnitude 9.2 megaquake roared up an inlet to Port Alberni, more than fifty miles from the coast. Dennis and his dad rushed to the pier to untie their fishing boat so it wouldn’t hang up on the pilings. The boat was spared, but dozens of others were smashed along with more than four dozen homes.
Chief Louis’s stories weren’t just relics, Dennis realized. After the 1964 tsunami, the elderly leader shared many of his stories with a historian, partly as a warning for white residents who now far outnumber the aboriginal people. He wanted them to know that their homeland has a violent side. “I learned from him how important it is to keep this oral history alive,” Dennis said.
That traditional knowledge can save lives was vividly demonstrated in the Indian Ocean tsunami. Two groups escaped the waves: the people of Simeulue Island, where the tsunami hit within fifteen minutes; and the Moken, or sea gypsies, who live on islands off the coast of Myanmar. Stories passed down in both cultures warned of giant surges that rush in on the heels of an earthquake. When they felt the ground shake and saw the water pull away from the shore, villagers ran for high ground.
Native American and First Nation communities didn’t take much convincing when Atwater and other scientists began uncovering evidence of giant quakes and tsunamis. “My grandfather said it, and then the geologists were saying it,” Dennis said. “These are things we should pay attention to.”
At Pachena Bay, where an entire village was wiped out by the most recent Cascadia tsunami, the Huu-ay-aht recently dedicated a new community center on a bluff overlooking the beach. Stocked with food and blankets, the site will give people a place to flee to when the next tsunami comes. Washington’s Quileute tribe got congressional approval in 2012 for a land swap that will allow them to relocate a schoolhouse, homes, and offices that sit just five feet above sea level.
Just down the coast, Riebe has earned the nickname “tsunami queen” for her work spreading the message she learned from her uncle so long ago, now validated by modern science. She counts among the highlights of her life a visit to the Copalis ghost forest with Atwater. “It was incredible to know that our Native American stories line up with what the scientists found out there,” she said. “Chalk one up for the Native Americans. We do know something after all.”
But it was another group of ancient people who would finally nail down the date and size of Cascadia’s most recent megaquake with a precision the best technology could never match. The discovery started with a Japanese researcher who reasoned that a Cascadia megaquake might have churned up a tsunami powerful enough to cross the Pacific. If so, one of the most sophisticated societies in the world would have been watching.
What most Americans know about Japanese history they learned from Hollywood. The TV miniseries Shogun and films like The Seven Samurai depicted a blood-soaked land where bandits raped and plundered and warlords slaughtered one another in a struggle for power. But by the dawn of the 1700s, Japan had been at peace for four generations.
Loosely united under a single ruler, the country was in the midst of a cultural flowering that brought the introduction of haiku and the golden age of Kabuki theater. For the first time, the shogun was a scholar, not a warrior. His government cared for abandoned children and built kennels to house stray dogs. At a time when less than a third of Frenchmen could sign their names, book clubs were the rage in the capital city of Edo, now called Tokyo. Even many peasants could read and write a little.
With no wars to fight, samurai passed their days drinking sake, writing poetry, and patronizing geisha when they could afford it. To earn their keep, many turned to administrative work in a society where bureaucracy had supplanted swordplay.
Regional daimyos employed legions of clerks to record crop yields, collect taxes, and catch peasants who skimmed off the top. The shogun’s auditors kept a close eye on the daimyos. In every castle and village, registrars recorded the statistics of daily life, from births and deaths to disputes and planting dates. Diaries were a popular medium for self-reflection and observations of the natural world. “The facts must be presented as exhaustively as possible,” one teacher advised. “An excess of detail is preferable to brevity.”
That conscientiousness extended to natural disasters. Japan’s earliest written record of an earthquake dates to 416 AD. Seismic bookkeeping was sporadic during the country’s centuries of war, but it became routine with the coming of peace. So a literate and watchful populace took note when strange waves roiled the east coast of Honshu in the twelfth year of the Genroku era under the zodiacal sign of the rabbit—1700 on the Western calendar.
It was a cold night. Villagers in the port of Kuwagasaki were roused shortly after midnight as torrents of seawater swept through their homes. The panicked peasants fled to the hills and watched as fires from overturned lanterns lit the sky and devoured buildings made of wood and rice-paper. In darkness the swells raced up the bay and into a river, swamping a smaller village and pushing more than a mile upstream. Salt water slopped into rice paddies and vegetable plots in the village of Otsuchi, twenty miles to the south. Farther down the coast a barge laden with rice was repulsed by high waves as it tried to thread its way into a river mouth. The headman of another coastal village wondered what to call the pulses that surged and receded like a series of swift tides. It reminded him of a tsunami, but there had been no earthquake.
Accounts trickled in from at least six spots on the coast spanning more than six hundred miles. The authors were mostly samurai and merchants, cogs in the machinery of government and commerce. They logged the emergency rations issued to villagers and petitioned higher-ups to provide “low-grade wood” for temporary shelters. The saga of the rice barge was written up because it ended badly. Unable to enter the river in the face of high water and waves, the vessel was forced to anchor in an open bay where a storm blew it aground. Two crewmen were killed and all thirty tons of cargo lost. Port officials filled out the maritime equivalent of a police report that included eyewitness accounts from villagers and testimony from the unlucky captain.
It’s hard to say which is more impressive: the level of detail in the reports or the fact that the reports survived hundreds of years, two world wars, and Japan’s transformation into a high-tech mecca. But historical preservation and seismology are twin passions in Japan. In the 1890s scholars began combing through ancient documents for earthquake accounts. By the 1990s the ledger of historical quakes filled twenty-one volumes. Few American geologists had any inkling the record existed or what it might have to say about Cascadia. But Kenji Satake did.
Born in Tokyo, Satake attended college on Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido. He wasn’t interested in earthquakes, but he gravitated toward professors who worked on glaciers and volcanoes because he loved to ski and climb mountains. In 1983 a large earthquake under the Japan Sea kicked up a tsun
ami that killed more than one hundred people. Satake got swept up in the scientific postmortem on the disaster and was hooked.
He’d never heard of the Cascadia Subduction Zone until he landed a postdoc at Caltech and met Tom Heaton. The USGS researcher told Satake about the possibility of megaquakes on the West Coast and about the Native American stories. Then he posed a question the Japanese scientist would get tired of hearing: how big was the tsunami triggered by the last Cascadia megaquake?
Satake couldn’t say. There were still too many unknowns. But he chipped away at the problem over the next several years, as Atwater and others gathered more and more field data. Satake built a computer model and plugged in everything that could be quantified about Cascadia’s most recent rip. Out of curiosity, he let his model run until the hypothetical tsunami crossed the Pacific. Satake was intrigued to see that a magnitude 8 quake would send only piddling waves onto Japan’s shores. But a magnitude 9 could create swells of six feet or more.
During his time at Hokkaido University, Satake volunteered for one of the professors compiling that twenty-one-volume opus on historic quakes. He traveled to tiny museums and mountain villages to examine old scrolls and manuscripts. Now Satake wondered, did those records include reports of a mystery tsunami several hundred years ago?
It seemed unlikely he would ever find out. The error bars around the radiocarbon dates were wide enough to span several centuries. “Without a better date, it was just impossible,” he recalled. “I didn’t really take it seriously.”
Then the dates got better. For Satake the turning point came during a paleoseismology conference in California in 1994. He was there to finally answer Heaton’s question, with modeling that estimated the height of Cascadia’s latest tsunami at thirty feet. But he was most fascinated by the work of Atwater, Yamaguchi and others, whose tree-ring techniques and high-precision carbon 14 analyses had narrowed the window on Cascadia’s last quake to about forty years.
“Now that was a much easier period to work with,” Satake recalled. “That’s when I really got started.”
Satake enlisted his PhD adviser in Japan to help search for any records of a tsunami between 1650 and 1750 that arrived without any ground shaking. The older scientist quickly found one.
A Japanese earthquake historian had already laid a lot of the groundwork, singling out several reports about that cold night in 1700 when the sea attacked without apparent provocation from the earth.
A computer simulation shows the tsunami triggered by the 1700 Cascadia quake reaching Japan in about ten hours. (image credits 3.1)
But deciphering dates and times from centuries-old documents isn’t a simple job of translation. The language and style used by Edo-period scribes bear so little resemblance to modern Japanese that Satake could make out only a few words. The clock and calendar were even more convoluted, with seasonal variation in the length of an hour, a dozen zodiac signs, leap years, and a five-year master cycle based on elements like fire and water. When the pieces fell into place, Satake could see that the mystery waves first hit the Japanese coast around midnight on January 27, 1700.
The reports covered such a long stretch of coast that Satake ruled out storm surges as the cause. The detail-crazy Japanese also kept meteorological records, of course. None mentioned foul weather. The waves swept down the coast like a tsunami would, hitting northernmost ports first.
But Japan lies in the crosshairs of multiple subduction zones. The tsunami from Chile’s 1960 quake caused flooding and damage in several of the same villages hit in 1700. Alaska and Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula were also potential culprits. Satake checked historical and geological records. As best as he could tell from the sketchy data, there was no monster quake anywhere else around the Pacific Rim in early 1700. Satake concluded that the orphan tsunami had a parent, and its name was Cascadia.
What’s more, he thought he could date the birth with hospital precision. Racing through the open ocean at the speed of a jet, a tsunami from the Pacific Northwest would take about ten hours to reach northern Honshu. If Satake’s story was right, that meant Cascadia’s last megaquake hit at about 9:00 PM on January 26, 1700, in keeping with Native American stories of a winter’s night when earth and sea convulsed.
“Oh, crap.”
In his temporary office at Japan’s agriculture ministry in Sapporo, David Yamaguchi stared at the cover of the January 18, 1996, issue of the British journal Nature. It was a reproduction of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the well-known woodblock print of a colossal curl dwarfing Mount Fuji in the background. The image has become a tsunami icon, even though tsunamis don’t look anything like the wind-whipped wave the artist depicted.
Yamaguchi could guess what was inside the magazine. Preliminary reports were already circulating about Satake’s attempt to connect the dots between Cascadia and Japan.
“It just hit me over the forehead,” Yamaguchi recalled. “All of a sudden the pressure was on me to somehow wrap things up.” Loose ends from his tree ring data on the Copalis ghost forest and other sites on the Washington coast had been bugging him for years. Now Satake had raised the bar.
Until that point no one dreamed it would be possible to establish an exact date for the last Cascadia quake. It didn’t even seem important. Ballpark figures were good enough to estimate the intervals between quakes. What difference did it make whether the last monster struck in 1680 or 1720? What planners wanted to know was the monster’s size.
But a decade after Atwater’s first trip to Neah Bay, geologists were still debating the size question so vigorously that they coined nicknames for the opposing camps. The Apocalypse group believed the subduction zone’s last quake was a full-rip 9 that ruptured the entire length of the fault. The Decades of Terror gang insisted the fault ruptured in segments. The quakes would have been smaller—maybe magnitude 8—but they popped off in succession over a period of years or decades. The argument wasn’t close to being settled because neither camp had enough ammunition.
Satake’s story offered an arsenal. “All of a sudden there was a way to move forward to nail the magnitude,” Yamaguchi recalled. According to Satake’s computer models, only a magnitude 9 quake could explain the waves that sloshed onto Japanese shores.
Field geologists weren’t likely to be swayed by computer modeling, though. They view it the way cops view psychological profiles: suggestive, maybe, but not in the same league as fingerprints on a gun or a layer of buried sand. If someone could dig up hard evidence to back Satake’s story, it would prove Cascadia ruptured along its entire length. The Apocalypse camp would carry the day.
But confirmation would require a lot more legwork in Japan and for Yamaguchi an attempt to push tree ring dating to its very limit.
“There was a huge incentive to find out if Satake was right,” Yamaguchi recalled. “I was having a great time in Japan, but I knew I had to go home.”
Yamaguchi’s career hadn’t followed the path he had hoped for when he defied his father’s wishes and picked science over the family business. He had lugged enough hundred-pound sacks of rice to know he would never be content supplying Seattle’s Asian restaurants with groceries and chopsticks. A Hail Mary scholarship to Yale sprung him from the Beacon Hill neighborhood where he grew up. Summers spent working in national forests inspired an interest in trees. When his temporary post at Mount St. Helens ended, he got a job on the University of Colorado faculty and seemed to be launched on an academic trajectory. Then after five years, the university laid him off.
He was crushed for about a week. Yamaguchi is one of those rare people who isn’t faking it when he talks about silver linings: losing his job was depressing, but it opened the door to another dream—to live and work in Japan.
He landed a visiting appointment at Japan’s equivalent of the U.S. Forest Service. Even though a knee injury spoiled his plans for fieldwork, the third-generation Japanese American delighted in learning his way around the country and language. “I have this Japanese face, but I
didn’t know anything about Japan,” he said.
When Yamaguchi got back to Seattle, he worked days as a number-cruncher for health researchers at the University of Washington. Nights and weekends were spent fine-tuning his tree ring data and huddling with Atwater to figure out their next steps.
Eventually, the scientists would travel to Japan, working with Satake to validate his computer models with on-the-ground observations. Their goal was to extract all the detail possible from the Japanese records and landscape and use it to verify both the size and origin of the tsunami. A tsunami that came from Cascadia would create very different run-up patterns than waves that radiated from earthquakes in Chile, Alaska, or Russia. The extent of flooding would also be key to the size of the parent quake. Like any good detective, Atwater wanted to examine the scene of the crime for himself. Yamaguchi was the perfect Watson to his Sherlock.
The duo visited every site where the eighteenth century Japanese took note of strange waves. Atwater’s salary was covered by the USGS and Japan paid his expenses. Yamaguchi had to scrounge. The Japanese government extended one paid invitation. Other times he piggybacked on Atwater’s frequent flier miles. “It was all nickel-and-dime stuff.”
Yamaguchi’s translation skills and ability to navigate the country proved invaluable, particularly in rural areas. He soaked up the history and culture that his Nisei parents had rejected. “We were chasing these scientific facts, but for me it was also an odyssey into my past.”
Many of the towns and villages they visited were devastated in the 2011 tsunami. Otsuchi, the fishing settlement where waves flooded gardens in 1700, lost 1,400 people. The images played over and over on television of jet-black water pouring over a seawall were filmed in Miyako, one of the first ports hit by the orphan tsunami of 1700.
Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest Page 6