Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [100]
Like diligent researchers everywhere, though, they knew the quest for confirmation was not over. Convincing and logical evidence they had. But was there any other way to explain the data? Could any part of their hypothesis be falsified?
Satake sent a draft of his paper to half a dozen other researchers for reviews. His fellow scientists made suggestions for fine-tuning but gave it a thumbs-up. The editors of Nature liked what they saw enough to publish the breakthrough finding on December 5, 1995. The next phase of the investigation would be a thorough search for the original documents written by samurai warriors, local merchants, and public officials in villages along Japan’s east coast.
The story of how Brian Atwater and Kenji Satake found a way to work together brings a grin to my face. When filming the story of the orphan tsunami, I got caught up in the blind alleys of a detective story, fascinated by the logic and niggling details, constantly asking myself—how the heck did these guys figure this out? Along the way I forgot to ask how they tackled the research from such different scientific and cultural perspectives while separated by thousands of miles of North Pacific Ocean. Satake dashed off a quick email that gave me the context and the smile.
“As a traditional and sometimes stubborn geologist,” Kenji wrote of Brian, “he would not be convinced until he examined the data by himself. But the ‘data’ in this case are Japanese historical documents, not coastal geologic sections [in which] he was specialized. A normal person would not step further. Brian, however, was different. He first attended a class at University of Washington to learn Japanese. Obviously, learning a new language at an age of nearly 50 is not an easy task, and Japanese is not an easy language for westerners ... He spent about a year in Japan [1998–99] to study the historical documents and the social and historical backgrounds of the documents. Our goal was to write a book for the U.S. general audience to introduce the Japanese documents recording the Cascadia tsunami.”
Satake, Atwater, and their colleagues reexamined original documents in the six main villages and towns that had recorded the tsunami’s progress down Japan’s eastern seaboard. The waters arrived late at night on the north coast and worked their way south as the sun rose. In Kuwagasaki, a seaport village with roughly three hundred houses in 1700 where Cascadia’s wave first made Japanese landfall, the midnight flood and ensuing fire destroyed one-tenth of the homes. As villagers fled to higher ground the frigid water wrecked thirteen homes outright and set off a blaze that burned twenty more. The entry was written by a local magistrate, who noted the exact arrival time of the incoming tsunami.
At the south end of Miyako Bay the water washed away houses along the shore and then entered Tsugaruishi village just over half a mile (1 km) inland, where it caused panic among the residents and sparked fires that burned another twenty-one homes. An independent report written by a local merchant in his family’s notebook mentioned that there was no ground shaking—which must have seemed odd since this damaging mound of water looked so much like a tsunami.
From Tsugaruishi the wave continued another half mile inland and across a floodplain to a place called Kubota Crossing, and on to the foot of a hill that has long been capped by a shrine to the Shinto god Inari. This put the high-water mark for the 1700 tsunami at roughly the same place as the train of waves that came from Chile in 1960. That means Cascadia’s wave was about sixteen feet (5 m) high when it crashed to shore.
Farther down the coast at the river port of Nakaminato, around eight o’clock on the morning of January 28, high waves—probably strong outflow currents from the ebbing tsunami, churning against ordinary ocean swells at the river’s mouth