And what is it? A meteorological tsunami. Tsunamis are commonly driven by earthquakes as underwater mountains of earth collapse, bestirring the ocean into awesome destruction by flooding of land. A Meteotsunami can cause the same, but is driven by meteorological phenomenon, such as storm fronts.
And the results can be far more subtle:
Waiting for his first nibble of the morning, [Marvin] Katz remembers feeling the boat lightly rock. Then he looked toward shore and saw the breakwater had nearly been wiped clean: Some people were clinging to the rocks, others were floundering in the mouth of the harbor amid an entanglement of fishing rods and bait boxes.
“It just happened so fast. The water rose in seconds,” Katz, an 87-year-old Wilmette resident, recalled nearly 65 years later. “It was like an elevator was pushing it up. We looked up and realized all these people were in the water drowning and there was no one to help.”
Katz steered the powerboat alongside a 50-year-old man struggling to stay afloat and pulled him aboard. In the time it took to rescue him, the frenzied cries for help quieted and no one was left above water.
In a matter of minutes, an 8- to 10-foot “freak wave” spanning from north suburban Wilmette Harbor to North Avenue Beach in Chicago had submerged the lakefront, killing eight people. [Chicago Tribune]
In a phrase, rip currents had swallowed them up and killed them. More here.
