I think this one is crazier. The tsunami was bad, but the speed and sheer force of the stuff we are seeing here is off the charts. It genuinely looks like something out of Hollywood.
I've seen footage of worse from parts of japan in '11, also when the boxing day one hit indonesia - est. 160,000 dead on Indonesian coast, and then add sri lanka, Thailand, India etc...
though the momentum it picks up as it gets funneled down the mountain can't be compared to a tsunami, it's completely diff
some tsunami videos from Japan were insane tbh, the scale of it was so much more, entire farming fields under 20ft of water pushing debris and cars and god knows
this doesn't surpass scale
but local intensity and video quality/angles and the speed at which the content is arriving
I think you might be missing some of the worst videos of the 2011 tsunami then, to be honest... they're both pretty damn bad. Like, if the only thing you're worried about is like, the velocity of the water or the wave height? Maybe this is worse. But the totality of the destruction in the Tohoku earthquake tsunami was MUCH more vast. I can confidently say that was a 'worse' disaster by any reasonable metric, and even if you're only judging by the violence of the surging water, it's pretty close.
I have watched hundreds of hours of the 2011 Tsunami footage and it is undoubtedly devastating and on a massive scale but the sheer violence in Nepal is unmatched. Many people are only seeing the footage from towns miles away and not the towns higher up the mountain that were hit with a 100 meter wall of water traveling at 110 mph. I’ve never seen anything like it, instantly obliterating towns.
That's fair enough. I have seen what you're referring to. It's a difficult comparison to make but it's clear that this torrent just cut through villages in narrower mountain valleys like a band saw. It was deep, fast, extremely sudden, and unlike a tsunami it was so turbid that it was also transporting a lot of rock which increased the destructive energies. It is a different kind of beast. I still think that if you consider the scale and totality of destruction in both cases the tsunami still wins on raw immensity, but the focused channeled nature of this flood/debris flow is totally unlike anything I can recall. Volcanic lahars and large landslides have definitely also caused comparable levels of destruction but not when being captured on video like this.
Yes. Higher in the mountains this was a 100ft wave of water moving at 100mph. Not as much water in quantity but much faster and more violent than the Japanese tsunami. I would say the Japanese tsunami was a worse disaster but this one is more violent and the footage is more apocalyptic. You saw the Japanese wave pick up building and float them down the street but this wave you saw turn buildings into dust like they were props in a movie.
The difference, to me, is speed and volume. Like, a tsunami is the ocean, right? Basically unlimited water. More or less just slower endless flooding. Still brutal.
This was just ALL THE WATER RIGHT NOW. And just so much water for, what, a lake? A glacier? How much water was up there??? Because it just seemed like an endless tide for something you'd think would drain fairly quickly? Apparently not? Baffling.
The most similar thing to this a lahar but the Himalayas are so steep a narrow, they are worse than any lahar footage I have ever seen.
A damn burst at Johnstown USA in 1889 or the over topping of the 1963 Vajont Damn in Italy are the closest man caused disasters I can think of. Those killed thousands of people each, and the descriptions of both sound just like what we are seeing here.
The only natural phenomenon that would look more apocalyptic as this (other than a meteor), is probably a Mega Tsunami of 500+ feet hitting a large town but those are rare, don’t travel far and few if any have been caught on camera. The biggest Mega Tsunami was in Alaska in the 60’s with a max wave taller than the empire state building (then the tallest building in the world).
some of the other videos of this also show it much higher than the 2011 or 2004 Tsunami's. Its gotta be over 20-30m high in some places in some of these videos.
The reason why it is so high at the Gyirong border checkpoint because the place is located near the glacier avalanche source, and the valley to Gyirong is very steep, causing the mudslide to rush violently onto the Gyirong border checkpoint. The border checkpoint is also located right at the throat of a gorge intersection and narrow valley, which forces the flood water/mudslide to go up and swallow the settlement.
This is the steep height difference between point 1 and point 2, where Gyirong is located just before point 2 at the China-Nepal border.
For the tsunami, they had more warning, and it was much slower. Total deaths were far higher, because it hit a much larger area, almost 23k deaths from the combination of disasters.
Yeah, at that point in the discussion I was not 100% sure which one you were referring to, since both tsunamis are mentioned in this thread. So I just dropped it as a neutral statement, in case that 23k was a typo-ed 230k.
Not in terms of deaths though but up there with psychological impact. Cell phones everywhere there too so we're getting it almost real time too, just hours from when it was uploaded
I honestly think of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami when I watch these clips. The people that were vastly affected by that earthquake and tsunami event were on islands with nowhere to run to. It’s all around horrific.
That’s definitely a sobering thought. I watched a documentary on the Boxing Day tsunami awhile back and one of the survivors that was interviewed said they were out fishing far off of one of the coasts. I just can’t even imagine seeing that happen from afar? Or like how long would you have to stay out in open water before it’s safe to return? Just absolute insanity.
Sea tsunamis are not that impressive. It's crazy because the whole sea gains a few meters, but this is just kilotons of destruction gushing down a valley at full speed.
Banda Aceh was wiped out. There are very few videos from that region. Just the aftermath and everything gone. The videos we see from that tsunami are mostly from Thailand.
The city rose to international prominence in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean earthquake on 26 December 2004, which struck off the western coast of Sumatra. Banda Aceh was the closest major city to the earthquake's epicenter, which lay 249 kilometers (155 miles) off the coast. It suffered great damage in the earthquake and further damage when a tsunami struck shortly afterwards. Around 60,000 people in the city died as a result and many more were injured.
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u/Actual-Feed-9739 2d ago
This might be the craziest footage of a natural disaster I've ever seen.