Oceans Were More Turbulent In The Past

The recent quake in Japan has resulted in twelve thousand deaths, with more than fifteen thousand people reported missing. Several towns were severely devastated along a 670 km stretch between Erimo and Oarai. Several cities were destroyed heavily, the notable being the devastation of Minamisanriku - nearly half of its population, about 9700 people out of a population of 19170, got swept off and went missing.

Reading all of this, I thought that it must be one of the biggest natural disasters of recent times. I always regarded seawaters to be the most potent destroying force. River floods and earthquakes can also cause destruction, but by the very look of it, the ocean waters immersing plains presents a far more fearful sight than the other two types of destruction. I was therefore surprised to learn that it was not tsunamis that created the worst kind of destruction in recent times - rather, it is a frightful river that caused the worst natural disaster.

Floods caused by the Yellow river of China were the worst offenders in this regard. The floods caused by this river in 1931 and 1887 killed people millions in number. Floods caused by this river during those two years are ranked as the top two natural disasters in recorded history. The recorded data suggests that river floods and earthquakes have been the worst offenders in the recent recorded history of the world, when compared to tsunamis. By the very look of it, oceans seem to be capable of much larger destruction when compared to rivers. So, the fact that rivers probably caused more damage than oceans prodded me to dig a little deeper into this aspect. And the fact that I found was that oceans have been very calm over the last three millennia.

Sea levels have been continually rising for the last thousands of years because of the melting of ice in various parts of the globe into oceans. Over the last twenty thousand years, sea levels rose by 400 feet, at an average of 6.1 mm per year. Compared to this average of 6.1 mm over such a long period, sea levels have been pretty constant for the last three thousand years, rising at a very very paltry rate of just 0.1 or 0.2 mm per annum - a tiny fraction of what it was earlier. The turbulence or commotion in oceans would, I believe, be in direct proportion to the rate of rise in sea level. Seawaters have been pretty calm for the last three millennia, which is why we have not been seeing cataclysmic tsunamis in the recent recorded history. During the periods when waters were much more active, and when sea levels were rising much more rapidly, the destruction caused by the tsunamis must have been on a much bigger scale, accounting for all those worldwide catastrophic myths present in the lost history accouts of a large number of cultures.