Not Too Psyched about the Seiche

Damage from 1946 seiche in Hilo, Hawaii. Image credit: NOAA

On July 4, 1929, over 45,000 people gathered in Grand Haven, MI to partake in holiday events at Grand Haven State Park, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan in the sunshine.  A series of seiches attacked the Grand Haven shoreline after an early morning storm.  The storm produced a seiche that generated into high winds and 20-foot waves.  The seiche completely buried the Grand Haven pier sweeping people off and left helpless, while strong rip currents carried several more away from the beach.  The deadly seiche of 1929 was responsible for taking ten lives to the mighty and fierce Lake Michigan (Alexander 2005).

Nine years later, on July 13, 1938, another deadly seiche came about on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, just 20 miles south of Grand Haven, in Holland, MI.  It was a beautiful calm day on the beach at the Holland State Park.  Later that day, a huge amount of water that was piled on the Wisconsin shore two days earlier due to an east wind, returned to Holland in the form of a seiche.  The calm seas soon turned into monstrous ten-foot edge waves with fierce rip currents that swept people from the beach, pier and boats.  The seiche of 1938 claimed another five lives on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan (The Joint Archives of Holland 2001)

The massive Good Friday Earthquake that hit Alaska in 1964 caused seiches in swimming pools as far away as Puerto Rico.  This, according to my model is probably much closer to where the massive particle exited the ocean after orbiting THROUGH the Earth.  It would then proceed to orbit along the jet stream, gravitationally attracted to the other particles streaming through and eventually creating that “1000 year storm”  I talked about that struck the Northwest approx. 7 months later.

What source of energy is capable of turning a bright sunny day almost instantly into a maelstrom of wind and also gravitationally lift large amounts of water and dump it onto the shores?  Are our low pressure atmospheric gasses, made primarily of mostly inert Nitrogen capable of doing that without a source of energy to condense and collapse those gasses and create an instantaneous onslaught of wind and gravitationally lift water from the lakes?  Are we just so numb to it all that we just expect our atmosphere to act like that without any trigger?

Maybe so.

Godspeed

References
Copyright 2012 Stewart D. Simonson All Rights Reserved

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