Scientific Colloquium
November 4, 2005


Unusual seas ran ashore in Japan one winter's night in the year 1700.
People wrote of the effects:  flooded fields, wrecked houses, a fire, a
shipwreck, evacuation, fright.  Having felt no earthquake beforehand, some
of the writers called the flooding a "high tide" and most resisted calling
it a tsunami.  None could have known that a seismic shift on a North
American fault had set off a train of trans-Pacific waves.