the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii, the first place where we are expecting the tsunami to make landfall. Our exclusive coverage comes courtesy of KHAI, whose helicopter was over the volcano at Kilauea for another story today. Apparently, two intrepid hikers have decided they wanted to be the first to see the tsunami and have chosen a cliff-side vantage point. They appear to be at least 50 feet above the water, so we'll have to hope they'll be OK. They have not responded to repeated requests to leave the area.'
The camera panned away from the hikers and to the sea. Nothing unusual was visible, but the announcer's mood changed noticeably.
'What's that? I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but we are having some technical difficulties getting audio from the helicopter. We do have reports coming in that several airliners over the Pacific have reported seeing waves moving across the water in the direction of Hawaii at an incredibly high rate of speed, but none of those reports have been confirmed at this point.'
The camera panned back down to the cliff. The announcer continued his inane narration, but didn't add anything beyond what they could see. The water line had pulled back significantly from just a few seconds ago. The view shifted back out to the ocean again, and now they could see the first glimpse of white water far out to sea. It seemed to be moving slowly, but in just a few seconds it had moved much closer to shore. The camera continued to follow it, but Teresa couldn't get a good sense of the size of the wave because there was no frame of reference.
Finally, the camera had panned far enough as it followed the wave so that the shore was in view, but without houses or other buildings for comparison, it still looked unimpressive. The two people on the cliff's edge must have thought so too since they didn't move.
But when the wave broke against the rocks, Teresa realized that they weren't going to make it. She expected the wave to bounce against the rocks and reflect back into the ocean. Instead, it simply covered the rocks and continued to sweep up the cliff. Too late, the hikers realized the size of the wave and turned to run. Before they could get more than few steps, the wave washed over them, and they disappeared as if they were ants being washed down a drain.
Teresa gasped, and the saleswoman started to cough uncontrollably.
'Are you all right?' Teresa asked.
'Swallowed…my…gum,' the saleswoman said between coughs.
Teresa ran out of the store, leaving the saleswoman to fumble with her keys, intent on locking the door to a store that would soon no longer exist.
Off the coast of Diamond Head, Lani and Mia continued paddling alongside their two new friends. The view from this far out was spectacular, and their conversation and laughs were disrupted only by a low-flying plane that passed over them several times before heading back in the direction of Honolulu.
Chapter 24
The reason Gail Wentworth joined the Satellite Analysis Branch of the Operational Significant Event Imagery team was because they were the first to see images of every major environmental event in the world. Any time a volcano erupted or a cyclone blew across the ocean, the OSEI redirected its satellites to capture it. And Gail had a front row seat.
But even with everything that she had seen in her five years at OSEI, the call from Hawaii Civil Defense had come as a shock. She was still having trouble believing that there really could have been a meteor impact. In her wildest dreams, she never thought she'd get a request to look for evidence of one. Her specialty was the use of satellite imagery for storm track projection, so her first instinct was to work with the satellite technology at her fingertips.
Just as Gail Wentworth expected, clouds obscured the ocean in the area of the Palmyra Atoll, rendering the GOES-10 satellite images worthless. Both the 18:30 GMT and the 19:00 GMT photos showed a blank expanse of white that stretched for 200 miles in all directions around the supposed impact site. Not that she really knew what she was looking for. At that moment, she didn't savor the irony of having a PhD in meteorology but knowing virtually nothing about meteors.
The equipment, like the GOES-10 that hovered in a geostationary orbit thousands of miles from Earth, was used primarily to map large weather systems, particularly hurricanes. It wasn't intended for impact detection. With a resolution of one pixel per mile, even a major impact might only be 10 pixels across. There was a tiny patch of slightly darker cloud cover in the vicinity of the latitude and longitude given to her by Dr. Tanaka, but that could have been anything. Without a higher resolution photo, she couldn't confirm an impact.
The only other scientist in the operations center with her that day was Nathan Gentry. Gail was loathe to call on him for help. His satellite data analysis was top-notch, often detecting patterns that no one else saw, but he spoke in a nasal whine that Gail could take for only a few minutes, and his personal hygiene was spotty at best. He often wore the same clothes to work multiple days in a row; his current shirt was on day three. But he also had a hobby that was directly applicable to her crisis. Gentry was an amateur astronomer.
Gentry leaned over Gail's desk, peering at the GOES satellite image on her computer. She wrinkled her nose in disgust, but Gentry was oblivious to her repulsion.
'It would be so cool if there was an impact,' he said, 'but you'll never be able to see it on that.'
Gail knew that, but she didn't want to spend time defending her analysis.
'Did you check the POES image?' she asked. POES was their polar orbiting satellite system. It circled only a few hundred miles above the Earth.
'No image from that time of the day from any satellites. Besides, there's not enough resolution on them, either. We're not going to see it on anything we have.'
'What else is there? LANDSAT? IKONOS?' Both of those satellite systems were capable of high resolution photos from their low orbits, but it would be sheer luck if one of them had been over that region at the time of impact.
'Those and military. A spy satellite would give a great view, but no one spies on the central Pacific as far as I know.'
Gail threw her hands up in frustration.
'Then how are we going to find out if there was an impact?'
'I called a guy I know at Goddard Space Flight Center. He works on LANDSAT. They sent a new satellite up last year with a much wider field of view than LANDSAT-7, one that takes photos every thirty seconds on a constant basis. Can you believe that?'
Gail nodded in appreciation for the advance in technology. She wished for that kind of capability at OSEI. In a normal day, they were lucky to get 100 pictures from some of their satellites. Of course, they could take photos more frequently in an emergency, but they needed to set that up ahead of time. For events in the past, they were stuck with what was already photographed.
In her opinion, she shouldn't have even gotten this request. A meteor impact that no one knows about? Gail thought NASA had dropped the ball on this one.
'Wouldn't NASA see an asteroid headed toward Earth?' she asked. 'We should have heard about this days ago, maybe even months ago.'
Gentry scooped up one of the memos from her desk and pointed at the text.
'You see the period at the end of that sentence. Now imagine being two miles away from it. Think you could see it?'
Gail glared at him. Another annoying habit of his was to talk down to her.
'If I had a telescope, I might.'
'Right. You might. If you knew exactly where to look. Well, that's what it's like trying to find a 500-meter- wide asteroid that's five million miles away.'
'But as it gets closer to Earth, wouldn't it get easier to see?'
