The Tsunami Countdown (4 page)

9:08 a.m
.

K
ai wasn’t worried about the tsunami information bulletin Reggie had issued. It was a standard message issued whenever sensors
picked up seismic activity in the Pacific basin that might be powerful enough to generate a tsunami. Since it hadn’t been
a tsunami
warning
, the event must have been between 6.5 and 7.5 on the moment magnitude scale, fairly common readings that rarely resulted
in a tsunami. Below 6.5, they didn’t even bother to issue a notification. The bulletin was sent to all of the other monitoring
stations in the Pacific as well as the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska, which served as the warning
center for Alaska, British Columbia, and the west coast of the United States. The PTWC covered the rest of the Pacific. All
of the emergency and civil defense organizations in the Pacific Rim were notified, including the U.S. military, which had
extensive bases in the Pacific.

None of these organizations had to take any action; the message was strictly to inform them of a seismic event and its potential
to generate a tsunami. Already that year, the PTWC had issued over forty bulletins. None had actually resulted in a tsunami.

Once the bulletin was issued, the real work started. They had to analyze the data to determine how likely it was that a destructive
tsunami was heading for a populated coastline. If the event happened off the coast of Alaska, the closest tsunamigenic zone
to Hawaii, remotely operated buoys called Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis buoys—commonly called DART buoys—would
be able to tell the size and velocity of a tsunami headed across the Pacific. While much of the work was computer-automated
now, it still took a lot of sweat to verify the threat and calculate specific wave arrival times. It only took five hours
for a tsunami to reach Hawaii from Alaska, which was barely enough time to mount a coordinated mass evacuation.

The interior of the PTWC was just as neat and functional as the exterior. A reception area greeted visitors, and next to it
was a small conference room. The receptionist, Julie, had the day off, as did most of the rest of the staff. Kai picked up
a sheet of paper lying on the front desk to look at the specifics of the school group that would be touring the facility that
morning. Since the Southeast Asian tsunami disaster, tours had become much more in demand.
When Julie had scheduled the tour for Memorial Day, Kai was a bit surprised that a school would want to do anything that day
that didn’t involve sand and surf. Then she told him the school group was from Japan, one of the countries covered by the
PTWC, and it made sense.

He scanned the sheet. Twelve sixth graders from Tokyo for a thirty-minute tour, escorted by a teacher fluent in English. They
planned to be done by nine thirty and move on to a full day of sightseeing.

These students might actually be interested in what I have to say
, Kai thought. Sometimes he’d get a school group of bored American teenagers who’d be itching to leave as soon as they got
there. Kai couldn’t get those tours over fast enough.

He dropped the sheet back onto the counter and patted Bilbo.

“Come on. Let’s find out what’s going on.”

Following Bilbo, Kai walked the few steps into the data analysis facility, which was packed with state-ofthe-art computers
and seismic sensing equipment. Huge maps of the Pacific lined two of the walls. Since the news media often got information
faster than the PTWC did, the two TVs on either side of the room were perpetually tuned to CNN. He and Reggie spent most of
their time in this room. Still farther back in the building were the individual cubicles and Kai’s tiny office.

Normally, George Huntley and Mary Grayson, the two most junior geophysicists, would be manning computers on the other side
of the room. It hadn’t taken Kai long to realize they had started a relationship, and the last he had heard, they had both
taken their day off to go surfing together on the North Shore.

Three of the other scientists were attending a conference that week in San Francisco, while the director, Harry Dupree, was
on a three-day holiday to Maui.

Kai found Reggie hunched over a computer monitor, munching on an egg salad sandwich, the empty wrapper of a second sandwich
lying next to him. When Reggie heard the dog’s claws clicking on the linoleum, he looked up.

“Thanks for joining us this fine morning,” Reggie said. “I thought maybe you were gonna play hooky today.”

Kai nodded toward Reggie’s sandwich, which was already half its previous size. “Is there ever a time of day when you don’t
eat?”

“Hey, I don’t want to get all skinny like you.”

There was no danger of that. Reggie Pona, a huge bear of a man who used to be a defensive lineman at Stanford, must have weighed
at least three hundred pounds. Reggie was also one of the brightest geophysicists Kai had ever met. A Samoan by birth, he
had used his college football scholarship to accomplish his true goal of becoming a scientist.

Reggie took a bite and continued to talk while he chewed. “I thought you might go with your friends to the beach. Teresa is
hot, by the way.”

“You know, sometimes you almost convince me that you’re not a nerd,” Kai said. “But then you open your mouth to talk and remind
me. Besides, I couldn’t leave you alone with all those impressionable sixth graders. You scared the bejesus out of the last
group.”

“I was just telling it like it is.”

“But did you have to show those pictures from Sri Lanka? I think ten-year-olds are a little young to see photos of dead bodies.”

“Hey, if it keeps them from running down to the shore during the next tsunami warning, I’ve done my job.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’ll do the next few tours. Where’s the bulletin?”

Reggie handed Kai a sheet of paper. On it was the date followed by a standard tsunami information message:

Kai looked at Reggie. “It doesn’t seem like anything to be concerned about.”

Normally Kai would consult with Harry, but today Reggie and Kai were on their own. Although Kai was growing more comfortable
with his responsibilities, he was still fairly new. This was the first bulletin issued while he was in charge.

The previous assistant director had left for NOAA headquarters in Washington to coordinate the development of a worldwide
tsunami warning system. Kai’s position at NOAA’s Center for Tsunami Research put him on the short list of replacement candidates.
From Kai’s perspective, the job had seemed perfect. He could move his career forward while still doing interesting research.
Rachel had plenty of job opportunities at Honolulu hotels. And Kai could finally get out of Seattle’s rainy climate and back
to warm, sunny Hawaii.

“No, it shouldn’t be anything to worry about,” said Reggie. “But it
is
pretty exciting.”

“Why?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute. But the threat of a tsunami
is almost negligible because the event was not tsunamigenic.” The statement was made as a fact, not an opinion.

“You seem pretty confident.”

Reggie smiled. He always smiled when he was about to explain something that was perfectly obvious to him. “It barely triggered
the alarms. The reading was just 6.6. A couple of ticks down, and we wouldn’t have even sent the bulletin.”

“Remember the Asia tsunami?” Kai said. “The initial readings on that were 8.0. It ended up being a 9.0.” Because the moment
magnitude scale for earthquakes—a successor to the Richter scale—is nonlinear, the power of an earthquake goes up exponentially
the higher it is on the scale: an earthquake measuring 9.0 releases over thirty times more energy than an 8.0 earthquake.

“I’m just checking with NEIC now, but I don’t see it going up much.” The seismic equipment at the National Earthquake Information
Center monitored data readings from stations around the world, allowing them to determine the location of an earthquake to
within a hundred meters.

“And,” Reggie continued, “the seismic wave patterns suggest a strike-slip event.” Strike-slip faults move sideways instead
of vertically. Vertical displacements of the ocean floor cause most tsunamis, like the one that had struck South Asia in 2004.

“Besides, it’s in an area that has never generated a
tsunami. That’s actually why I called you,” said Reggie. “Look at this.” He pointed at the computer monitor.

The screen showed a map of the central Pacific with a blue dot pinpointing a position five hundred miles northwest of Christmas
Island, southwest of the Palmyra Atoll. The color blue meant that the quake was located near the earth’s surface.

“What’s the distance from here?”

“About two thousand kilometers,” said Reggie. A little more than twelve hundred miles.

Kai did the quick mental calculation in his head that was second nature to all tsunami scientists. Since all tsunamis traveled
at approximately five hundred miles per hour in open ocean—about the speed of a jet airliner—it was easy math. But before
Kai could speak, Reggie handed him a printout.

“Already got it.”

The printout showed a list of station names and codes of all of the tide gauges in the Pacific Ocean. Next to each station
name was its latitude, longitude, and the estimated arrival time for the potential tsunami.

“Looks like that gives us between two and two and a half hours.”

“I’m predicting we’ll barely see a tide change,” said Reggie. “The tide sensor at Christmas Island will tell us for sure.”

Kai looked back at the printout. Any wave generated by the event would reach Christmas Island in thirty-five minutes.

He checked the tide gauge schedule. Most of the tide gauges would transmit their readings to a satellite, which then got relayed
to the PTWC. Although the gauges were cheap to produce and monitored tide levels twenty-four hours a day, their main drawback
was that they sent the tide-level data only once an hour.

Kai scanned the list to find Christmas Island. The next transmission would be only five minutes after the wave was supposed
to arrive there.

“Show me the earthquake map.”

Reggie clicked on the appropriate icon, and colored dots bloomed on the map around the blue marker. The circles showed the
seismic events around the Pacific Rim, with the different colors representing the depths of the events. A few red stars punctuated
the map, showing where tsunamis had started. None of the stars was located within five hundred miles of the blue dot.

“That area has never even had an earthquake,” Kai said.

“Weird, huh?” Reggie said. “I’d guess one of two things.

First, it could be a fault that we’ve never detected before.”

“Highly unlikely.”

“Right. But second—and this is the exciting part—it could be a new seamount. That would explain why it’s so shallow.”

Now Kai understood Reggie’s excitement. A new seamount was a rare phenomenon, essentially the birth of a new island. An underwater
volcano erupted over a magma hot spot on the ocean floor, building a mountain around itself and regularly unleashing earthquakes
in the process. If the seamount got high enough, it broke through the surface of the water, which is exactly how the Hawaiian
Islands were formed and were still forming, as the continual eruption of Kilauea on the Big Island spectacularly demonstrated.

If this event did turn out to be a seamount, Reggie would get the credit for discovering it. For a geophysicist, it was analogous
to an astronomer finding a new comet.

“Congratulations,” Kai said. “If it turns out to be a new seamount, you’ll get journal articles out of it for the next five
years.”

“Damn straight.” Reggie winked. “If you’re good to me, I might have room to put you as second author.”

“Your generosity is overwhelming.” Reggie let out a huge belly laugh at that. “But before we start celebrating,” Kai continued,
“let’s make sure that we’re not dealing with a tsunami here. You’re doing the usual?”

“Other than figuring out a name for my seamount,”
Reggie said, “I’m working with the NEIC to pinpoint the quake more precisely. I’m also scanning the ANSS database to check
our readings against theirs.” They had a direct feed from the Advanced National Seismic System, the data source for the NEIC
estimations.

Kai nodded in appreciation for how fast Reggie moved. “Good work. After Christmas Island, our next tide reading won’t be until
the wave reaches Johnston Island.”

Then Kai remembered something.

“Hey, isn’t the
Miller Freeman
testing a new DART buoy about a thousand kilometers southeast of here?” The NOAA research vessel was responsible for maintaining
all of PTWC’s oceangoing equipment.

Reggie tapped on his computer. “Yeah, they started setting it up two days ago. They should be there for another week.” He
overlaid the ship’s location on the earthquake map. Before the Asian tsunami, there were only six operational DART buoys,
but now new ones were coming online every few months, one of the few positive outcomes of the Southeast Asian disaster. The
buoy they were currently testing was intended for the coastline of Russia.