Ideas

The Orphan Tsunami

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The tsunami that struck Japan in January 1700 with no felt earthquake, a mystery in the imperial record until tree rings on another continent supplied the parents.
Documented

The adoption of 1996-2005

Documented: the tsunami struck Honshu around midnight of January 27-28, 1700, recorded in village and castle town records with damage but no earthquake. Satake and colleagues' 1996-2003 work inverted the wave heights to require a roughly magnitude 9 rupture off North America; the match to the ghost forests' 1699-1700 ring death and the native accounts fixed the source: the Cascadia megathrust, evening of January 26, 1700, the wave crossing the Pacific in about ten hours. Synthesis published as USGS Professional Paper 1707 (2005).

Assessment: Documented to the hour, one of the great feats of historical seismology. The archive's standing exhibit that absence of local evidence is not evidence of absence.
Stories

The wave with no story

The folk force of the orphan concept: for three centuries Japan had a wave with no quake and America had dead trees with no date, two archives each holding half a catastrophe. The orphan framing now names the general problem, events recorded at the receiving end whose sources were never written down anywhere.

Assessment: Documented as both case and method. The generalization is the archive's own, and it is the honest engine behind half the wings on this site.
Interesting claims

The global circuit

The claim: the orphan tsunami is proof of the archive's deeper thesis, that catastrophes are planetary, records are local, and only cross-archive collision reconstructs the event. The flood-myth literature adds the coda: the myths may be orphans too, waves whose earthquakes we have not yet dug up.

Assessment: The first half is documented method. The second half is the archive's standing hypothesis, strengthenable only by findings like Perkins, not by repetition.
Sources and further reading
  1. Satake et al., Nature, 1996, and the 2003 source inversion
  2. The Japanese village and castle records of January 1700
  3. Atwater et al., The Orphan Tsunami of 1700, USGS PP 1707
  4. The ten-hour Pacific crossing computation
Worth asking

What else in the historical record is an orphan, an effect whose cause is missing from the same archive?

Open in the interactive archive
GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+