You have probably heard a lot of things about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan on Friday. Some of them are probably true. Japan did move several feet, even locations in the U.S. moved a little bit. The earth’s rotation rate was likely changed. And it may have had something to do with the moon.
I was in HSV on Friday, but will gather some of the information on the earthquake and seismic physics (including movement of continents and earth rotation), and the tsunami itself, try to explain it, and post it all by tomorrow afternoon. If a physics guy from Samford who teaches classes that involve wave dynamics at UAH can’t explain some of this, I shouldn’t be teaching.
This is a truly catastrophic situation in Japan. The human loss and suffering is extreme. However, there is a lot of interesting science involved here, some of it rare, that can be explained by the basic physics of solid bodies and waves. I’ll try to bring in many pictures and animations. One fascinating thing about the tsunami as it spread across the entire Pacific Ocean is that is approximated by a “shallow water” wave, even though the Pacific Ocean is thousands of feet deep. The wave was just big.
