A while ago
Dr.Hans-Joachim Zillmer suggested something about Tsunamis that I found rather intriguing and worthy of investigation:
And on he goes! Zillmer, quote: „A Tsunami is not a wave, it is an energetic effect!“ Sounds crazy right, think again!
Thank you Cosmos for introducing this freethinking engineer. He has published many book about his thoughts over the last 20 years, and the link Cosmos gives leads to the whole thread. In this post, I shall try to address some of he idea Dr. Zillmers brings up.
Below are two of Dr. Zillmer's slides. In the first he talks about gas and oil being a result of abiotic synthesis:
In the second slide, he mentions the formation of tsunamis and explain them as a result of gas breaking free from the ocean floor. In the image, there is mention of an electrical discharge.
His suggestion is that gas is released from the bottom, and that this moves the water in such a way that an energetic effect is created, which he relates to Newton's Cradle as Cosmos explained. Here is the screenshot:
The question is if this explanation can explain tsunamis? Does it work if not all the time, sometimes, or perhaps not really? Below I try to clarify what I understand so far.
First the statement: „A Tsunami is not a wave, it is an energetic effect!“
A tsunami only becomes a wave on shore or near the shore when kinetic energy is transformed into potential energy (when the kinetic energy of the tsunami hits a continental slope for example). Only then water begins to move and creates a wave (size and how it behaves largely dependent on the makeup of the shore (shallow for example))
A casual observer of a video would agree that there is wave after wave, the waves rise and fall, the first wave is often not the worst. How and where does the kinetic energy become a wave?
I can only agree a tsunami is an energetic effect. In the first post, I wrote: "Tsunamis are secondary events that can happen for a variety of reasons." That was admittedly vague, and I did not emphasize on the physics of it, but mainly the destruction and casualties. Perhaps it was a bit like focusing on the light that a lamp emits, whether sufficient, insufficient, harmful or not, without bothering about how that light came there in the first place. Or as another example, commenting on a volcano eruption while skipping the details of the vulcanologist, but talking about destroyed houses and roads.
The problem of Zillmer's bobbles
I can't understand how Zilmer envisions the bobbles being able to transfer the energy to the water that later somehow translates into a tsunami wave that hits land.
Gas and pressures in the deep oceans
First, I'm not sure that I understood the image with the tsunami correctly because where does electricity or charge come in. Is there an electric discharge that heats up the gas? I tried to look up gas emissions from the sea. Is he thinking of something like this:
Huge amounts of greenhouse gases lurk in the oceans, and could make warming far worse
Stores of methane and CO2 in the world's seas are in a strange, icy state, and the waters are warming, creating a ticking carbon time bomb.
For every 33 feet (ca. 10 m)
/10.06 m of ocean water, the pressure increases by one atmosphere.
Compressed natural gas is stored under a pressure of roughly 200-250 atm if
converted, from the following wiki information:
Compressed natural gas is a
fuel gas made of petrol which is mainly composed of
methane (CH4),
compressed to less than 1% of the volume it occupies at
standard atmospheric pressure. It is stored and distributed in hard containers at a pressure of 20–25 MPa (2,900–3,600 psi), usually in
cylindrical or
spherical shapes.
This pressure is achieved at 2000-2500 meters, which is rather deep. Pure methane needs 32 MPa or 316 Atm to remain a liquid at
21 degrees, that would take us to 3200 meters.
However, that is only considering the water as a pressure factor. The density of the sea sediments would be higher and for every meter we measure below the bottom the pressure would increase, as would the temperature, but the latter initially not too quickly. Within the first 100 meters of seal floor, we could easily add up another 30 atm of pressure.
It is cold in the deep ocean — less pressure needed to keep a gas liquid
Deep in the sea the temperature is lower, so the required pressure to keep the gases dissolved would be less. Here is
an image of the middle latitude temperature profile in the ocean:
In spite of the depth and the pressure, Zillmer suggest that it can break loose, and that electricity is involved. I could imagine that a large electric charge could create currents that would heat up the rocks and the water so that the gas under pressure could be released. Another option would be that some disturbance excites the gas dissolved in the liquid. I don't know the details of it, but I take the example of a Champagne bottle being shaken vigorously before being opened though in the case of the Champagne remains in the bottle, because the bottle is build to withstand the pressure. But are such scenarios realistic?
How do deep ocean volcanoes behave with their emissions
I tried to look up deep ocean volcanic explosions and while they do happen the usual degassing does not occur in the deep, at least to a different extent than for surface volcanoes.
How volcanoes explode deep under the ocean. It seems down there the Zillmers theory does encounter problems.
How fast do gas bobbles move in water
Parts of the oceans are not very deep. How would the bobbles move in the water, if they could? It turns out someone made
a video describing a study:
Observations of bubbles in natural seep flares at MC 118 and GC 600 using in situ quantitative imaging Popularized here:
The Fate of Hydrocarbons Seeping from the Ocean Floor
The study abstract reads:
This paper reports the results of quantitative imaging using a stereoscopic, high-speed camera system at two natural gas seep sites in the northern Gulf of Mexico during the Gulf Integrated Spill Research G07 cruise in July 2014. The cruise was conducted on the E/V Nautilus using the ROV Hercules for in situ observation of the seeps as surrogates for the behavior of hydrocarbon bubbles in subsea blowouts. The seeps originated between 890 and 1190 m depth in Mississippi Canyon block 118 and Green Canyon block 600. The imaging system provided qualitative assessment of bubble behavior (e.g., breakup and coalescence) and verified the formation of clathrate hydrate skins on all bubbles above 1.3 m altitude. Quantitative image analysis yielded the bubble size distributions, rise velocity, total gas flux, and void fraction, with most measurements conducted from the seafloor to an altitude of 200 m. Bubble size distributions fit well to lognormal distributions, with median bubble sizes between 3 and 4.5 mm. Measurements of rise velocity fluctuated between two ranges: fast-rising bubbles following helical-type trajectories and bubbles rising about 40% slower following a zig-zag pattern. Rise speed was uncorrelated with hydrate formation, and bubbles following both speeds were observed at both sites. Ship-mounted multibeam sonar provided the flare rise heights, which corresponded closely with the boundary of the hydrate stability zone for the measured gas compositions. The evolution of bubble size with height agreed well with mass transfer rates predicted by equations for dirty bubbles.
The rising speeds were listed as around 13.3 and 21.9 cm/s which is not a lot, that is less than a km per hour. I had imagined that the gas bobbles would expand as they go up, but it turns out some gas gets dissolved, so the small bobbles shrink. If Zillmer's theory of gas induced tsunamis is correct, one might expect that there would be tsunamis in areas where there is a lot of oil and gas at or below the sea floor, like the Gulf of Mexico. The study I quoted was done there, the bobbles were small, and we don't see many tsunamis there.
What about very big bobbles
Zillmer might counter, that the study only deals with small bobbles, which seems to be the normal way of seeping in the Gulf of Mexico at least, but maybe there are some big bobbles somewhere.
However, a question is if super large bobbles would even be stable? It turns out even fairly small bobbles are not stable. A paper from 1987 discusses
The stability of a large gas bubble rising through liquid? With a lot of math, but to give an idea here is a paragraph:
Observations of the maximum volume of air bubbles that remain intact in five different liquids in a wide tank were made by Grace et al. (1978), and table 2 shows the relevant physical properties of these five liquids. In the last two columns values of the Reynolds number and Bond number for the bubbles of maximum size are shown. Unfortunately for the present purpose it appears from the shape-regime diagram compiled by Clift et al. (1978, figure 2.5) that only for the first of these liquids, ethylene glycol, were the values of the Reynolds and Bond numbers large enough for the bubbles to be likely to have a clear spherical-cap shape. For this liquid Grace et al. give 119 cm3 as the observed maximum volume of bubbles remaining intact, and for a bubble of spherical-cap shape with a semi-cone angle of 50" this corresponds to R, = 7.0 cm. This observation is compatible with the curve for AC = 1.25 (which is appropriate for ethylene glycol) in figure 10 if 5 = 0.082 and if the magnitude of the initial disturbance was rather large. Grace et al. say that they allowed 'at least one minute ... between injections' of bubbles of known volume in a tank 46 cm in diameter and 2.8 m deep.
There was a report from 1944 about R, =15 which could mean a bobble with a volume of one liter, but it is still very limited.
Zillmer mentions Newtons Cradle and claims that an earthquake can not generate a tsunami. I think this is contradictory, because what if that first ball that swings, setting the cradle in motion was an earthquake? One could also say that the analogy does not hold, because the water is liquid while the steel balls are not, but that may be too rigid. I tried to see where the analogy would lead. Looking up the details of Newtons Cradle, even on the
Wiki, one finds a simple solution and a more complete solution, each having their ranges where they better explain what goes on. It turns out the complex solution includes concepts that involve Hooke's force that can describe spring oscillations which in an x-y diagram looks very much like a wave, even though they only move up and down when we look at them. On the Russian Wiki for
oscillation period, there is an animation.
Determining the velocities
[4][5][6] for the case of one ball striking four initially-touching balls is found by modeling the balls as weights with non-traditional springs on their colliding surfaces. Most materials, like steel, that are efficiently elastic approximately follow
Hooke's force law for springs, {\displaystyle F=k\cdot x}
, but because the area of contact for a sphere increases as the force increases, colliding elastic balls follow Hertz's adjustment to Hooke's law, {\displaystyle F=k\cdot x^{1.5}}
. This and Newton's law for motion ({\displaystyle F=m\cdot a}
) are applied to each ball, giving five simple but interdependent
differential equations that are solved numerically.
The problem is that the water is not a solid body.
On the other hand, Hooke's law is an accurate approximation for most solid bodies, as long as the forces and deformations are small enough.
The use of the the analogy with Newtons Cradle has limitations and one come upon
Hooke's Law that describes and oscillation. How Zillmer can conclude, there is no wave, I fail to understand. If we throw a stone, there is waves. If we have a landslide falling into the sea there are big wave to the extent that they create tsunamis. If you have an asteroid impact then also there are waves. Under
physical oceanography there are many pages about waves if one scrolls down.
From a Russian scientist
I tried to look up what professionals say. There is a book, the
Physics of Tsunamis by Boris Levin and Mikhail Nosov, from Springer. Noticing they were Russians, I looked for something in the original language and found from one of the authors a
small booklet from the publisher, teach-in.ru From this booklet I have taken a few images to give a perspective.
One says that the speed of the crest of the energy is equal to the square root of the gravitational constant multiplied by the depth of the ocean. If the depth it four km he gets about 200 m/s. He does not explain it, but if one insert and approximates it is:
square root of (10 m/(s^2)x4000 m = square root of 40,000 (m^2/s^2) =200 m/s. This is 1 km every 5 seconds, so 12 km in a minute, and 720 km in an hour. The wavelength is very long and that can explain why some time passes between each wave hitting a beach. That the water rises can be explained by the speed of the wave being broken by the shallow seabed. If we step off a quick "rolling pedestrian street" in an airport, we are also thrown a bit forward when we get off.
The image from lecture 2, page 14 shows the reasons for tsunamis: with the red being seaquakes (79), green, landslides or underwater landslides (6), yellow, volcanoes (5%), turqouise, meteorological (3 %), violette meteorites, no data, unknown grey 7 %,
One notices that there are no data for meteorites, but 7 % for unknown, which also could include some monster bobble, if they exist as the illustration from Zillmer would suggest. Nosov, the author, claims that the 2011 quake displaced 100 cubic km of water. If 100 km^3 are displaced something happens, as illustrated in this
video of a tsunami being generated by an earth quake, or maybe
Natural Phenomena: Seaquake
called seaquake. How accurate the model in the video is one can discuss. For a small model, notice how the level of water changes when you get in and out of a bathtub. Something has to give way, and it is not your body.
On page 20, Nosov remarks that since the planet is 70 % water, and since there are many impact craters on land, and a few have been located at sea, more much have fallen in the sea and each could have created a tsunami:
6 = The oval effect of the water molecules also explains how and why water is receding before a wave from a tsunami comes inland
Or it might be better explained by a wave with a long wavelength. From the
Wiki
All
waves have a positive and negative peak; that is, a ridge and a trough. In the case of a propagating wave like a tsunami, either may be the first to arrive. If the first part to arrive at the shore is the ridge, a massive breaking wave or sudden flooding will be the first effect noticed on land. However, if the first part to arrive is a trough, a drawback will occur as the shoreline recedes dramatically, exposing normally submerged areas. The drawback can exceed hundreds of metres, and people unaware of the danger sometimes remain near the shore to satisfy their curiosity or to collect fish from the exposed seabed.
A typical wave period for a damaging tsunami is about twelve minutes. Thus, the sea recedes in the drawback phase, with areas well below sea level exposed after three minutes. For the next six minutes, the wave trough builds into a ridge which may flood the coast, and destruction ensues. During the next six minutes, the wave changes from a ridge to a trough, and the flood waters recede in a second drawback. Victims and debris may be swept into the ocean. The process repeats with succeeding waves.
7 = Consequently, Zillmer suggest that all the sensors that are operating in the oceans "to measure/predict" a tsunami are practically useless if they don't detect (take into account) that described effect. For example; buoys in the oceans that don't take those factors into consideration.
Does this suggestion match with observations? From an observational point of view, if the sensors they have, can catch some tsunamis and lead to correct predictions in many case, then that should be okay. Here is an image of what the system looks like. Apparently the system is only installed in some areas.
One can read about the project under
NOAA Center for Tsunami Research - Tsunami Forecasting
There have been efforts to make the detection better by using ships and high precision GPS.
New Science: Using Ships For Tsunami Warning
by
James Foster, University of Hawaii (
TheConversation) Racing across ocean basins at speeds over 500 miles per hour,
tsunamis can wreak devastation along coastlines thousands of miles from their origin. Our modern tsunami detection networks reliably detect these events hours in advance and
provide warning of their arrivals, but predicting the exact size and impact is more difficult.
The potential solution to this problem came about by chance. In 2010, I was running an experiment with colleagues using high-accuracy GPS on the UH research vessel Kilo Moana. On its way to Guam, the Kilo Moana was passed by the tsunami generated by the magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Maule, Chile, on February 27 of that year.
In the deep ocean this tsunami wave was only about 10 cm (about 4 inches) high with a wavelength of more than 300 miles. Its passage would normally have remained undetected, lost amid the several meters of heave of the ship in the regular waves. However, careful analysis of the data collected by the GPS proved that the system we had in place accurately recorded the tsunami signal.
A wave length of 300 miles is 480 km! A lot of water can hide behind a swell of 10 cm when the wave approaches land and the main swell is still many km out and many minutes away, but the drawback of water from the beach has begun. Scarry!
or near an area where tsunamis 
can occur
. If a tsunami hits, it is better to be out of the way. This can be a few km away from the beach, and high enough above it, and oddly enough a safe place is also the deep sea, where the amplitude of a tsunami is mostly insignificant.