Question:
how big would a tsunami have to be to wipe out upstate NY?
Ginger
2011-03-31 05:46:45 UTC
how big would a tsunami have to be to wipe out upstate NY?
Three answers:
anonymous
2011-03-31 05:48:34 UTC
veryyy big
Roger K
2011-03-31 13:40:43 UTC
It would help to know if you mean ALL of upstate NY, or only the part where you live.....



Upstate consists of more than 45,000 square miles. To completely flood that area would take an completely unimaginable quantity of water. To flood the Adirondacks, the water would need to be more than 5,000 feet deep.



Albany, Syracuse and Rochester are up to about 500 feet above sea level. Binghamton is 800 feet or so.



Tsunamis are very rare, if they happen at all, in the Atlantic ocean. It is so unlikely that there would be any such an event as to consider it impossible. To have a tsunami that would make it into Upstate NY is many orders of magnitude less likely.



If you look at a map, it will be clear that any tsunami will either have to cross all of Massachusetts, or go across Long Island, and over Connecticut to get to the upstate area. Anything coming straight down the Long Island Sound and parallel to the South Shore will go into New Jersey rather than go up the Hudson River Valley.



If there was an impact of a large enough meteor or asteroid near to the east coast to generate the kinds of waves that could overtop any of those barriers, then it is quite likely that everything within many hundreds of miles of the coast will be dead anyway.
charcinders
2011-03-31 13:11:52 UTC
It would have to be high enough to get up the Mohawk Valley, let's say 500 feet. Of course it would lose a lot of energy on the way so at the coast it would have to be 800 feet high at a guess. Realistically the only thing that could cause that would be an asteroid or comet impact in the Atlantic.


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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