Inexorable.
As I continue to watch the videos of the tsunami, the word that keeps coming to my mind is inexorable. The almost impossible juxtaposition of fury and calm. There is nothing agitated about the inexorable power save the struggle of the objects caught in its path. On March 11, 2011, immovable object would have lost to the irresistible force of the tsunami.
These pictures, both from NYT, remain indelibly stamped in my mind of the horror. The first, because it was the first one that I saw of the horror, the rising sea capturing the immensity of the water and the small cars and houses, looking pitifully small. The second, because of my horror of whirlpools, instilled early in me by my father with tales of powerful people drowning in rivers, caught in the inexorable power of a whirlpool.
And another testament to the power of the earthquake that caused this tsunami is in an article published in NYT today:
“Global positioning stations closest to the epicenter jumped eastward by up to 13 feet.
Japan is “wider than it was before,” said Ross Stein, a geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey.
Meanwhile, NASA scientists calculated that the redistribution of mass by the earthquake might have shortened the day by a couple of millionths of a second and tilted the Earth’s axis slightly.“
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