Paleotsunamis Offer a Quiet Warning
This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.A boulder that weighs more than 40 tons sits on the sand high above the ocean. Dwarfing every other rock in view, it is conspicuously out of place. The answer to how this massive anomaly got here likely lies not in the vast expanse of the Atacama Desert behind it but in the Pacific Ocean below: Hundreds of years ago, a tsunami slammed into the northern Chilean coast, sweeping boulders landward like pebbles.