They rounded a bend in the path and the haze lifted above the shoreline with the passing of the landslide. The massive wave had dragged away all the water near the edge of the island as it lumbered west, exposing the sea floor well beyond low tide.
“Lookit!” Una said, pointing a dust-caked finger.
“Where did the water go, Papa?” asked Isla around a cough. The air had grown more hazy the lower they descended.
“It’s coming back,” Gunter said, feeling a tickle in his own throat. “And we don’t want to be here when it hits!”
He turned and bolted down the path. They were halfway down the caldera trail now, and his boots slid on gravel that seemed far looser than it had been on the hike up. He glanced through the trees and watched the stunning progress of the massive wave as it raced away from La Palma. Ash swirled in the air, temporarily obscuring his view, and he coughed.
When the air cleared, he saw a series of smaller waves, each hundreds of meters high, rise up and follow in the first’s wake. But headed toward the shore. The ocean sloshed along the coast in waves larger than any he’d ever seen before—yet dwarfed by the huge walls of water heading west.
“It’s a tidal wave!” Heidi yelled, coughing.
Gunter felt the earth tremble again, the movement strengthening by the second. He looked where his wife pointed and saw a wall of water, hundreds of meters tall, crashing ashore and spreading across the already ravaged landscape. Boulders the size of houses flew in the air and trees splintered like toothpicks before the wave as it traveled uphill.
He glanced up at the caldera behind them. Smoke and ash billowed up from the awakened volcano, competing with the tangled cloud further south, rising from what was left of Cumbre Vieja. Below them, the water continued to crash through the trees, racing up the steep slopes of the caldera.
The ground shook and fire exploded into the sky up-slope. Globs of lava fell hissing and sputtering all around them, igniting any trees and grass in their path. Volcanos erupted in front of and behind them. Below them, a tidal wave of gargantuan proportions raced uphill. There was nowhere left to run.
A hissing ball of lava the size of a grape hit Heidi’s shoulder and her shirt went up in flames. She shrieked and fell to the ground as the girls cried. Gunter tried in vain to help his wife but couldn’t put the fire out. Heralded by a loud whooooosh, a cloud of superheated ash raced down the slope faster than Gunter thought possible. It slammed into them at close to 50 miles an hour, blasted through the trees, over rocks, and instantly surrounded the Magnussen family. The heat was unbearable and the air exploded from a moderately warm 85˚ to almost 1,000˚ before Gunter could react.
He tried to scream, but his lungs were seared from the inside as soon as he opened his mouth. His last spark of consciousness was to curse the day he thought it would be a good idea to bring his family on holiday to La Palma.
Gunter Magnussen collapsed over the smoldering corpse of his wife, next to the lifeless forms of his little girls, buried in a foot of ash. A few agonizing seconds later, Gunter and his family took their place among the day’s rapidly growing list of casualties.
When the water finally receded, several minutes later, the caldera’s southern slope emerged bare, scoured of trees and all vegetation. Like the coastal cities erased by the Cumbre Vieja landslide further south, there was no trace left of anyone on the caldera when the ocean retreated.
Though La Palma lay in smoldering ruins and the rest of the Canary Islands were likewise devastated, the landslide wasn’t quite finished. The series of monster waves it had spawned aimed west, racing the sun across the Atlantic at jetliner speeds. As the mega-tsunami spread out, the entire western hemisphere fell in its crosshairs.
Introduction
Water. Graceful, beautiful, it is a vital necessity of life, but it can also be one of the more deadly forces mankind encounters. A human will die of thirst in as little as three days without water, yet less than a foot of moving water can not only knock an adult down but drown them as well.
When a large body of water moves in one direction, we call it a wave. Waves can range from the gentle ripple created by a child tossing a pebble into a still pond, to the wind whipped fury of a hurricane storm surge.
Humans have always had a love-hate relationship with waves. Some of us enjoy riding them, turning these beautiful, powerful forces of nature into playthings. On the other end of the spectrum, we call waves that appear at random and reach terrifying proportions rogue waves, long known to sink ships that ply the open oceans and some of the world’s larger lakes.
Of all the different types of waves, however, none hold more mystique and fascination than tidal waves, known more popularly by the Japanese word tsunami. By definition, a tsunami is a wave of abnormal length and height, often created by an undersea earthquake or some other disturbance. Tsunami has been so ingrained in popular culture in recent memory that people use the word in everyday conversation meaning an unstoppable, overwhelming flood of something.
Tsunamis caused by undersea earthquakes unleash tremendous destructive power. On December 26, 2004 a massive seafloor quake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia created a tsunami that spread across the Indian Ocean from Australia and Indonesia to India, Sri Lanka, and the eastern coast of Africa. In total, more than 227,000 people died in 14 countries as
