Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [83]
He wanted to master the mathematics—and the art—of digital water. If he could learn enough about fluid dynamics to reproduce the behavior of a wave with a numerical model in a computer, he and his colleagues might be able to improve the world’s tsunami warning systems and save lives. He recalls how hard it was before Sumatra to get people interested in or even concerned about this rare monster from the deep.
“There was very little awareness in the larger society about the danger of tsunamis,” Titov said. “It was difficult to convey this message to society because the first question people would ask is, ‘When was the last big tsunami?’ And you say, ‘1964.’ It just doesn’t sound that convincing.” To many the threat seemed as farfetched as getting hit by an asteroid. The work remained an arcane specialty practiced by an elite group of gifted mathematicians who could have held their conventions in a phone booth.
The study of wave mechanics had begun with work on hurricanes and typhoons about twenty-five years earlier. Hurricane science had decent funding because people saw the destructive power of these storms and their waves several times every year. Most of the world’s impression of tsunamis was based on scraps of grainy film footage shot decades ago in Hawaii or Japan or on badly faked waves in B-grade Hollywood disaster flicks.
The émigré math whiz Vasily Titov, however, was destined to change all that and NOAA’s Eddie Bernard helped make it happen. Titov was one of the new wave of modelers Bernard assigned to the Cascadia problem not long after the Petrolia earthquake. “His models are—the way they convey so much information in such a short amount of time—can only be called art,” enthused Bernard, “because in science that’s not easy to do.”
They first met in 1989 at an international tsunami conference held at the Novosibirsk Institute of Electrical Engineering in Russia—at the geometric center of Eurasia, the world’s largest continent. “I remember the banner,” said Bernard, picturing the slogan that adorned the meeting hall: “‘We are the furthest from any coast in the world, so this is the safest place from tsunamis in the world.’ And I think that’s true.” He laughed, enjoying the irony.
Titov wanted the chance to work with state-of-the-art equipment to develop software that could anticipate the behavior of big waves. “Realizing how dangerous this phenomenon is, we definitely were working on the science of describing the tsunami with the ultimate goal of actually forecasting it,” Titov told me. Folding geology, oceanography, and hydrodynamics together in a package that could mine data from several sources at once and then create animated waves that accurately mimic nature in real time was a tall order on a shoestring budget.
So he eventually moved to Seattle, where he joined Eddie Bernard’s research team at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. Money and technology aside, the odds of getting something like that to work seemed as steep and improbable as forecasting earthquakes or asteroids. Even the best supercomputers back then were struggling to imitate the flow of water. Adding the complexities of gravity and friction across rough surfaces along the bottom, undersea mountain ranges that could steer a moving wave in a new direction, and the infinitely convoluted bathymetry of every harbor and beach—all of which would affect the movement of a tsunami—was a daunting prospect even for someone who loved math. Titov packed his kit and moved from the safest, most tsunami-free zone in the world to one of the most dangerous.
On July 12, 1993, little more than a year after Cascadia’s fault started unzipping