No You Can't Outrun a Tsunami. Maybe the fastest man in the world could run a 6-minute mile for 6 miles (10 kilometers) while a terrifying wall of water chased him through a coastal city. But most people couldn't.
Yet a myth persists that a person could outrun a tsunami. That's just not possible, tsunami safety experts told LiveScience, even for Usain Bolt, one of the world's quickest sprinters. Getting to high ground or high elevation is the only way to survive the monster waves.
"I try to explain to people that it doesn't really matter how fast [the wave] is coming in, the point is that you really shouldn't be there in the first place," said Rocky Lopes of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Tsunami Mitigation, Education and Outreach program.
But because they didn't know the warning signals, ignored them or just couldn't get to safety in time, more than 200,000 people died in tsunamis in the past decade. And it's not just tsunamis: Underestimating the power of the ocean kills thousands every year in hurricane storm surges.
Stay off the beach
A tsunami is a series of waves caused by a sudden underwater earth movement. The kick-off is akin to dropping a big rock in a children's pool filled with water. In an ocean basin, tsunami waves slosh back and forth, reflecting off coastlines, just like the (much smaller) waves in a child's pool, Lopes said.
Because many people mistakenly think a tsunami is a single wave, some return to the beach after the first wave hits, Lopes said. On March 11, 2011, a man in Klamath River, Calif., died after he was swept away by a second wave while taking pictures of the Japan tsunami, Lopes said.
Tsunamis race across the deep ocean at jet speed, some 500 mph (800 km/h). Near shore, the killer waves slow to between 10 to 20 mph (16 to 32 km/h) and gain height. If the offshore slope is gentle and gradual, the tsunami will likely come in looking like a rapidly approaching tide. If the transition from deep ocean to shoreline is steep and cliff-like, then the wave will resemble a movie-like specter, arriving as an onrushing wall of water.
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