Surge

A fishing boat was carried over a wooded spit of land and out into the open sea. The two people aboard said afterwards that they had looked down at the treetops as they passed.

That was 1958, in an Alaskan inlet, and the water that did it reached 524 metres up the opposite hillside - higher than the Empire State Building, and by a wide margin the largest wave ever measured. It was caused by a rock falling into a bay. There was no earthquake, no storm, and no warning of any kind.

Surge is about water arriving where it should not be, and about the fact that it arrives in four completely different ways, which kill differently and need entirely different things done about them.

Inside you will find:

- The dam in the Italian Alps that held perfectly while the town below it was destroyed
- Twelve transatlantic telegraph cables that broke in order, and timed a landslide nobody saw
- The drowned country under the North Sea, and how you find a wave that happened eight thousand years ago
- Why a storm surge is not a wave at all, and what actually makes one
- The country that cut cyclone deaths a hundredfold using concrete rooms on legs and volunteers on bicycles
- The wave sailors described for two hundred years before an instrument finally caught one
- Why the tide in one Canadian bay rises sixteen metres and in the ocean outside it rises less than one
- And the cities that are sinking faster than the sea is rising

Twenty-six short chapters, twenty hand drawn diagrams where a picture says it better than a sentence, a box of surprising facts in every chapter, and a closing thought. The book ends with a quiz and a page of sources.

The third volume of What the Earth Does, after Ash and Fault. For readers of Simon Winchester, and for anyone who has ever stood on a harbour wall and wondered how high the water has been.