Lituya Bay is a strikingly beautiful body of water located in Southeast Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park. But the very features that make the bay so beautiful -- its steep cliffs -- also make it prone to potentially deadly rockslides.
Forty-seven years ago, on July 10, 1958, a powerful earthquake triggered a huge rockslide into Lituya Bay, generating the world's biggest recorded wave.
"It dislodged a huge mass of rock that was up on the valley walls there, and it cascaded down into Lituya Bay itself," said Dr. Roman Motyka, a geologist with the Geophysical Institute. "And it was sort of a bathtub effect -- as this debris hit the water, it generated a huge wave."
It was as if a giant had dropped a boulder into a stream, causing it to overflow its banks. But in this case, the boulder was the size of an apartment building and it fell from an incredible height -- 3,000 feet up the side of a cliff.
It was like a meteor striking the bay -- 40 million cubic yards of rock impacted the water at hundreds of miles per hour, creating in seconds a wave 1,700 feet high -- taller than the Empire State Building.
Not only is Glacier Bay the site of the world's biggest tsunami, it's also the site of the world's second-biggest wave ever recorded -- a 490-foot monster that swept through the bay in 1936. That was 22 years before Howard Ulrich and his son rode that big tidal wave of 1958 and lived to tell about it.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7743538/
