To freeze water, you don’t have to be the character Sub-Zero from the
beloved game Mortal Kombat.
Nowadays you can just put your water in the freezer, wait a few minutes,
and the job is done.
But what do you do if you want to freeze a few
million liters of the liquid that are moving at you at a speed of 500 miles
or 800 km per hour?
It is at such a pace that the most destructive waves
on the planet - tsunami - sweep across the open oceans.
Transforming an enormous body of water into a giant hunk
of ice would be a challenge even for the likes of Sub-Zero, but I can
tell you what it will take to accomplish such a thing.
By the way, before I forget...
The “cool” idea for this video was given to
us by our active subscriber RGC, so lets thank him with likes!
Thanks, dude!
Now, before moving on to the main question, lets remember just why
these deadly waves do occur.
As there is no smoke without fire, so a tsunami is not an independent phenomenon.
It appears as a result of underwater earthquakes, landslides, volcanic
eruptions, meteorite falls, or comets ... Basically, any large disturbance
in the water can raise waves tens of feet high.
And to add insult to injury, getting away from a
tsunami is almost impossible.
Once this gigantic displacement of water reaches land, the water moves at a speed of
6 to 12 miles, or 10 to 20 kilometers, per hour.
Unless you happen to already be in a car on a road
leading in the right direction, and can drive away from this multi-million-
ton liquid monster, the streets will turn into small rivers before you can
even think about getting into a vehicle.
Getting out of the path of the tsunami is also rarely an option unless you
are lucky enough to be near one of its edges - the total tsunami width
averages from between 60 to 120 miles (that’s from between 96 to 123
km).
But, if this terrifying natural disaster catches you in midocean,
you might just survive... as long as you are as far as possible from the
coastline!
If you are aboard a ship, and tsunami sneaks up behind you, and
land is not visible - you can relax.
Interestingly, under such conditions, the height of a tsunami
will be a maximum of measly 2 feet (or about 60 cm), and not an inch
more!
You might not even notice it passing by.
But everything changes fundamentally when this false tide reaches
the shore.
The massive wave is now drastically and suddenly reduced in
length, its energy and mass bunching up, whereupon it begins climbing,
reaching a height of as much as 100 feet (that’s 30 meters), or
even more!
10 to 15 minutes of this colossal assault is all it takes to bring
everything to hell and ruin, flooding entire cities and anything else that
stands in the way of this ruthless, relentless elemental beast.
The most powerful and highest tsunami on record occurred in the year
1958 near Alaska.
The wave rose risen to a record 1,720 feet, or
524 meters!
This is higher than the Eiffel Tower, or the former World Trade
Center in New York!
This wasn’t just a tsunami...this was a mega-tsunami.
This wave of waves had so much force that it uprooted thousands
of trees... and it also stole away about a hundred human lives...
And although it was the most powerful tsunami recorded to date, it wasn’t
the deadliest...
In 2011, a large-scale tsunami disaster in Japan - where
the word “tsunami” originates sadly
claimed the lives of 15,000 people.
And prior to that, in 2004, a gigantic super-tsunami that started off the coast of
Indonesia resulted in the deaths of over 230,000 people across 14 countries.
As much as we would like for such disasters to remain
in the past, the likelihood of a new tsunami appearing is actually increasing
every day, according to some researchers!
At first glance, the reasoning behind the increasing
chance for more tsunamis is far from obvious.
But scientists say it is due to global warming!
Melting glaciers could result in ice landslides, and the
fall of huge rocky, icy slopes.
If large enough, such a thing could result in
a devastating, giant wave!
As a matter of fact, the record-breaking tsunami near Alaska occurred for just for
the same reason…
Such dark prospects are stimulating the best minds in the world to figure
out how to save millions of lives from future water-borne cataclysms.
A physicist at the University of Cardiff, one
Professor Usama Kadri,
kadri has proposed to solve the issue using sound.
For example, by blasting at full volume the latest Justin Bieber album, as
a result of which the tsunami simply be scared away...
Okay, I kid.
In reality, the scientist was referring to the use of gravitational sound waves.
Their energy should be enough, he theorizes, to disperse the impending giant
wave!
Though, to be sure, nobody yet knows how to create such a device
capable of first predetermining the approach of a tsunami,
and secondly, generating and releasing such a gravitational sound assault
in response, not even Professor Kadri himself.
There is a chance that in the future this problem will be solved.
Meanwhile, scientists are still considering all other possible options for
combatting tsunamis.
The Japanese recently decided to approach this
conundrum by building a giant wall along the coast of their island nation.,
in order to protect the land of the Rising Sun from these giant waves,
the length of the “great Japanese wall” will be more than 248 miles,
or 400 km, with a height of about 50 feet (or 15 meters)!
However, skeptics believe that such a structure, although it would look pretty darn
cool, would be unlikely to protect the country in every tsunami emergency.
Tsunamis that reach higher than the intended wall have been recorded
throughout history.
In addition, building such a construction along
the Japanese coastline is going to have a highly negative impact on
the environment in those regions...
But even if Japan does fence itself off from tsunamis with concrete walls,
what will the rest of the planet do?
It is time to call Sub-Zero for some help, because we’re going to fight this
water monster with cold!
The idea of nipping one of these H20 beasts in the
bud, before it reaches the shore, when it’s just getting started, may
seem quite obvious at first glance.
But this is a common misconception.
In order to freeze a wave below the surface, and at a fairly hefty depth,
would require turning an
entire ocean into ice, which is completely and utterly impossible.
Therefore, it would be better and more practical to start our freezing
process closer to the shore, where the waves gain their maximum
height.
At this stage, we need to throw out all our preconceptions and
beliefs about water freezing at a temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit,
or 0 degrees Celsius.
For fast-moving streams of water, lower temperatures are required.
The volume of the tsunami will be somewhere around 100 million liters, So,
to turn this amount of water into a glacier, we will need a temperature of
around minus -148 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s about minus -100 degrees
Celsius)!!
Hearing these numbers, Sub-Zero begins to beat a hasty
retreat...
But this is no problem, we can cope without him.
Though for a freezing operation of such scale we will need
to arm ourselves with a lot of freezers.
Did I say a lot of freezers?
Yes, we will need about 900,000 of these babies!
And they will all need to work continuously for about a
month.
In the end, they will use approximately 13,375,000 kWh of
energy.
This is the power required to glaciate the wave.
Our only problem is, as you may have guessed, we need
to do it a lot faster than a month.
Tsunamis, as previously mentioned, though not exactly
speedy, move a lot faster than that, and before you know it, the pretty
little metropolis you call home will be underwater…
So, let’s imagine that - somehow - we’ve managed to do the impossible
and the tsunami is now frozen.
But really this ice sculpture is going to need to be moved somewhere, otherwise it will
melt and complete its destructive work.
You could try to crush it and hand out martinis to
everyone nearby to celebrate the passing of the tsunami danger, but this
will devastate neighboring settlements with the scourge of alcoholism,
thus ruining the local economies.
It’s probably a better idea to take this “wealth” of ice somewhere far away with
the help of big trucks.
The most suitable option for work like this is something
called the BelAZ-75710 - the biggest dump truck in the world!
with a total loading capacity of a gargantuan 450 tons, we’ll
only need a mere 220 thousand of these giants to cope with our load of tsunami
ice.
Ah...but there is a slight problem...there are only 3 BelAZ dump
trucks in the whole world!
We do have some other options: for example, there’s the KAMAZ dump
truck with a loading capacity of 40 tons.
It’s no slouch.
But, unfortunately,
it will take 2.5 million of these machines to get the job done.
And again, they simply don’t exist in numbers like
these.
In fact, to even just get started, we’d have to use every existing
dump truck on the planet.
Long story short: freezing a tsunami and the subsequent
transportation of its ice to another location is an almost impossible
task for mere mortals to try to perform…
It’s difficult to imagine such a thing as a frozen tsunami happening in the
natural world...
But in all actuality, something similar does occur in real
life.
They call this phenomenon... the “ice tsunami”.
It is, of course, not a real tsunami, but the sight of such a spectacle
is exciting nonetheless.
This phenomenon occurs not in oceans, but in lakes.
When a thaw comes, the first cracks develop on the solid
ice “mirror” on the surface of the lake.
Strong winds then send the scattered blocks of ice towards the
coast, as a result of which they split and start piling up on top of each
other.
These solid ice waves may even come ashore, which scares the
screamin’ bejesus out of the locals.
And sometimes ice rising from an ice tsunami can even invade human dwellings, if
they are too close to the shoreline.
However, this phenomenon isn’t particularly dangerous.
At least you can run away from it - heck, you
can walk away from it - in contrast to a real tsunami, which - I think
we now finally understand - cannot be thwarted by low temperatures…
Though you know, perhaps we can freeze something else to stop a
tsunami?
As I said, global warming and melting glaciers are only
increasing the likelihood of a tsunami.
And if we can manage to reduce this effect by getting the temperature of
the planet a few degrees lower, then there will be one less reason for these
destructive waves to form in the first place.
The only question is: how to do it?
Freezers are surely out of the question…
I know that I have the coolest and most imaginative subscribers on all of
YouTube, so if you happen to have a crazy - or merely interesting - idea
for a video, let me know by writing in the comments!
Those who offer the best ideas will definitely get into one of
the newest videos!
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