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Steven Ward
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An earthquake off the coast of Washington and Oregon could send a tsunami as high as 2.6m (8.5ft) down the coast of California.
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This afternoon, a prescient friend sent me a link to a Santa Cruz Sentinel story about Steven Ward, a UC Santa Cruz researcher who models tsunamis caused both by earthquakes and by meteorites. Ward researches possible tsunamis in Asia as well, but he has been modeling earthquake-induced tsunamis on the coast of California. Ward says a 7.5 magnitude quake could send a 15-foot tsunami to the Santa Cruz shoreline in minutes.
In 1946 an elderly man was killed by a wave while walking around the point from Cowell Beach from a 7.5-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Alaska. A Santa Cruz restaurant located at the entrance of the Municipal Wharf reported that water levels rose up to its floorboards.
There’s a ton of information, simulations, and presentations at Steven Ward’s Web site.
