Episode 146: Transcript
Episode: 146: We Don’t Give a F*ck About Canon
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, we've been doing this podcast for nearly six years.
Annalee: [00:00:05] I mean, is it really six years? Because I feel like we were in cryosleep for part of that time and like we had some AIs that like our uploads were doing it for a couple of years.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:15] I mean, I think that the virtual versions of us were doing the podcast and that counts, you know?
Annalee: [00:00:19] Okay. Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:21] It's been since 2018. We've been doing it for six years. We're closing in on 150 episodes and it's like a lot to listen to. That's like, I don't even know how many hours that is. That's a lot of hours.
Annalee: [00:00:31] never going to go listen to all of them, but I will make my upload listen to everything.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:35] Okay.
Annalee: [00:00:35] Over and over again.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:38] Yeah, yeah, yeah. People sometimes ask me like, which episodes of our opinions are correct they should definitely check out like, which are the most important episodes of the podcast.
Annalee: [00:00:46] Mm hmm. The most important are obviously all of the ones where we got to talk about pudding.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:56] Pudding.
Annalee: [00:00:56] I mean, people don't realize, how much of a through line pudding really is in this show.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:02] Pudding is in the proof. Yeah, yeah. So, the point is, you're developing the OOAC canon. There are certain episodes that are part of the canon of the podcast. And then certain things are no longer canonical. Like, you know, there might've been a time five years ago when we expressed some opinions that we later realized are not as correct as we thought they were.
Annalee: [00:01:21] The butterscotch pudding opinion.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:23] I know, the butterscotch pudding opinion. That was terrible. And so, you know, there's some things that are more canonical about the podcast, some things that are less, and that makes me wonder, like why the heck do people love to argue about canon so freaking much?
[00:01:37] And what does it mean to say that a story is canonical or that it's canonized? Is it a saint? Do we have to like bow to it every time we look at that story?
[00:01:47] So today we're going to talk about the whole idea of canon and why it's such a weird thing to think about. And later in this episode, we'll be talking about tsunamis that happen on inland bodies of water, like lakes or creeks. And we'll be talking to Dr. Aggeliki Barberopoulou, who's a professor at Tufts University who has been researching the tsunamis triggered by the 2002 Denali earthquake in Seattle.
[00:02:11] Okay. So, you're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, and I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer. I sometimes write comics. My most recent publication is a trade paperback of a mini-series called New Mutants: Lethal Legion.
Annalee: [00:02:26] Dun, dun, dun. I'm Annlee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction. And my forthcoming book coming in June is called Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. And it is a nonfiction book. But I do talk quite a bit about science fiction in it.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:46] So for our Patreon supporters, we'll be doing a mini episode next week where we talk about our favorite stories that will not or should not be considered canon. Like, you know, our favorite fanfic, our favorite weird media tie-in books, or just, stories that were kind of disavowed by the creators later on.
Annalee: [00:03:04] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent? Yeah, it's funded by you instead of billionaires who are eating weird space acorns that they genetically engineered out of their own DNA. That's right. We avoid all of that stuff because you are helping us through Patreon. And if you join our patreon at any level, whether it's five bucks or 20 bucks, you're just helping to make this podcast happen.
[00:03:33] Plus you get mini episodes, you get to hang out with us in our Discord channel and hear more of my opinions about pudding. So, think about it, all of that could be yours for a few bucks a month, and anything you give goes right back into making our opinions more correct. So, find us at www.patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:55] I gotta say I'm really craving pudding now. All right,
Annalee: [00:03:57] All right, let's start the Pudding Show!
[00:04:06] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:04:35] Today we're going to be talking about the idea of canon. and you know there's actually two meanings to the word canon when it comes to science fiction and fantasy and I don't like either of them. So, the first meaning of canon usually has a the in front of it like the canon and it's this idea that there are particular works of science fiction and fantasy that are like essential or seminal that you can't claim to know about the genre unless you've read or seen certain things.
[00:05:01] The other use of canon refers to continuity between a long-running or expansive series like which power ranger stories really happened and did every single episode of the Star Trek animated series really happen to Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock? And you know, it's funny, when I first started talking about the idea for this episode, I thought that I was just talking about canon as in continuity, whereas Annalee, you thought that we were talking about the canon as in essential works, and that made me realize that those two ideas are fundamentally kind of the same thing.
Annalee: [00:05:36] Okay, I am prepared to hear your argument here. Why are they the same thing?
Charlie Jane: [00:05:42] They’re both about what counts and what matters, and they're both about attempting to kind of corral an ever-expanding list of works into some semblance of order. And because there's an ever expanding list of works, like, more books are being published all the time, there's more Star Trek episodes all the time, goal becomes harder and harder to achieve, and they ultimately come down to, both versions of canon, ultimately come down to controlling something that you cannot control, that nobody can control. And the only purpose for this is really to kind of have a bunch of pointless fights that nobody can ever win.
[00:06:18] So, okay, first of all, let's talk about the canon. Annalee, I'm going to send you a quote from a blog post from a few years ago from friend of the pod, John Scalzi.
Annalee: [00:06:30] Who is, I would say, part of the canon. So this is what, Scalzi writes.
[00:06:35] “As a practical matter, the science fiction canon is already dead. There are at least two generations of adults now and two generations of genre writers who didn't grow up on it and fundamentally don't care about it. Long gone are the days where a kid's first introduction to the genre was a Heinlein or Asimov novel, smuggled out of the adult section of the library or bookstore like Samizdat.
[00:06:58] “The kids these days? They got their start reading genre through the YA section. They don't care about the canon. And why should they? What they grew up with was sufficient for what they needed, to be entertained when they became readers and fans, and to be inspired if they became creators or writers.”
[00:07:14] So, I think that Scalzi is partly right here. I do think that there are many versions of what the canon is and that, you know, we don't have to start every discussion of science fiction anymore by saying like, no, we're not going to be talking about Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov. Thank you very much.
[00:07:37] But I think now, there's a new canon. The canon is evolving, but there's still institutions like the SF Masterworks series or American Library editions where certain writers are kind of elevated.
[00:07:56] There's also the system of awards, for example, where certain writers get awards and I'm not just talking about like the Hugos and the Nebulas, which are sort of within the science fiction community awards, but like things like, getting like a major literary award, which some science fiction writers do, and I think is kind of a big deal. Octavia Butler got a MacArthur Genius Award, and I think she was the first science fiction writer to get one.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:27] I think so, yeah.
Annalee: [00:08:29] And, yeah, and so, and that was this big moment. So I think we do have a canon, or the canon, but it's shifting, it's changing, but.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:42] It's fluid.
Annalee: [00:08:45] It's more fluid, and I think realistically all canons are actually quite fluid, even if you teach in a literature department, you know that things that were considered part of the literary canon 50 years ago are now not as much anymore. And of course there's new authors who've entered, like Toni Morrison, like nobody would teach an English literature class that dealt with the 20th century and neglect Toni Morrison unless they were fools.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:08] Very true, yeah.
Annalee: [00:09:12] Yeah, but, but 50 years ago, of course, or even 30 years ago, that wouldn't have been the case.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:16] Yeah, I mean, it's so true what you say about the SF Masterworks. It's so true. I'm looking at my shelves. I've got a bunch of those. I've got a bunch of these American, Library of America. Books of like Le Guin specifically, but at the same time if someone loves science fiction fantasy and hasn't read Le Guin I'm not gonna give them shit about it. I'm not gonna be like, well, you don't really know the genre. I’ll just be like well, you've got a treat in store for you whenever you get around to Le Guin because obviously she's amazing. But you could also just have read people who were influenced by her.
[00:09:47] I think the thing that I like about what Scalzi says here is that every generation finds speculative fiction in its own way and kind of defines its own sense of what the canon is and like, you know, it's interesting. Scalzi wrote that blog post in like 2020, I think, and back then it was like, oh, people are finding… The kids are finding it through YA and like, it's already changed since then. Now it's TikTok.
Annalee: [00:10:05] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:06] And now it's like romantasy, like books like Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros, which is, I double checked, it's not a YA book. It's actually marketed as an adult book.
Annalee: [00:10:15] Rebecca Yarros was a, is a romance writer.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:20] Right.
Annalee: [00:10:20] That's kind of her jam. It's actually a really fun novel. I'm reading it right now.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:23] Yeah, I know. And like, so, okay, Annalee. You have been a humanities professor in the past, and you're actually becoming one again, and when you think about questions of the canon, does this bring back some memories for you?
Annalee: [00:10:35] Yes. It brings back a lot of traumatic memories from the 1990s when there was this moment, kind of like today in the United States where there were a lot of conservative attacks on higher education and a lot of hand-wringing over the fact that students were reading Black authors instead of reading like important white men from 2000 years ago, among other things.
[00:11:02] And it really was like a kind of moral panic over what happens when the old literary canon often the canon that was codified in the early 20th century. So it was, like, a lot of things like Greek and Roman works, and European writing. What happens when that goes away? Like, does that mean that suddenly now nobody is educated and nobody really has critical thinking skills?
[00:11:31] But luckily there were some really amazing pieces of writing and thought that came out of that period inspired partly by a scholar named Stuart Hall, a British scholar of cultural studies. He founded what's called the Birmingham School and he was arguing along with a lot of other critics that you know, we can apply critical thinking skills and, and the kind of readerly analysis, to almost anything in pop culture.
[00:12:02] He famously wrote a series of essays about the astrology column in a local publication. And of course, he also wrote about literature. He wrote about, his own experiences as a Caribbean British guy dealing with, like, the British canon, but also coming from, a colonized place.
[00:12:22] And so he was really interested in this idea that you can't really have a canon because in order to really understand your culture you have to appreciate the fact that people are participating in that culture from many different places, from many different positions, and also that what audiences love to watch or read is important to understand.
[00:12:47] Like, so we should read Fourth Wing as well as reading, you know, Dickens, you know? Like, why don't we read Rebecca Yarros right alongside Charles Dickens and kind of figure out How these stories, say something about us as humans.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:02] Yeah, and I did a little research about this, and it seems like the first idea of codifying a literary canon gets its most basic expressions in the mid-18th century. And there's a scholarly paper that we can link to in the show notes about that. people in the mid-18th century were really concerned with the question of, like, which authors were going to be quoted by Star Trek villains? Because they basically chose like Shakespeare and Milton were like the two authors. They were like, these are like the authors everybody has to read.
[00:13:30] And of course, you know, you get to the Star Trek and like, that's what Khan and like various Klingons love to quote Shakespeare and Milton as well. And so that was the thing that they were really worried about the 18th century.
Annalee: [00:13:42] But also Melville.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:43] They didn't have Melville yet in the mid-18th century, but yes. That's true that Melville also is up there.
Annalee: [00:13:49] I know, but that's funny that they were like, that was how they broke canon. They were like, oh, we're going to let like one American white guy be part of our canon.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:55] Mm-hmm. Part of the Star Trek villain canon.
[00:13:57] I feel like that is an important criteria. Like has this author been quoted by a Klingon general or by Khan?
[00:14:05] But yeah, so, but I think that the canon first becomes like politicized and like a thing that we like yell about, in the 1960s which is the start of people starting to champion works by marginalized creators. And that's when the idea of the canon gets set in stone and to quote Jean Luc Picard, “To oppose something is to maintain it.”
Annalee: [00:14:26] Yeah, I wonder if, and I would just add that Stuart Hall starts his career in the 1960s, so that he's kind of part of this revisionist view. And I think there might be something to the idea that in speculative fiction, we're kind of going through that same process of people are challenging the canon, and somehow the challenge to the canon is what's solidifying the canon.
[00:14:52] And so it's like, we only know what the bad old canon was because it's what a lot of people are reacting against.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:58] I think that's definitely true. Okay, so let's pivot to the other meaning of canon, which is like, canonicity, and the question of which stories really happened.
Annalee: [00:15:09] Yes. Why is that a big deal? And when does that kind of become one of the things that we talk about with canon?
Charlie Jane: [00:15:18] I mean, I think it becomes a big deal because you have these universes that have been going so long that there's no way that everything could have possibly happened. Like if every single Batman story really happened, Batman would just be a wreck. There's no way that Batman could… there's no way you could fit that many events into one person's life.
Annalee: [00:15:39] He'd also be like a hundred years old.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:40] Yeah, exactly. Like, there's just at a certain point, there's so many things that have supposedly happened to one person that is just impossible. So you have to kind of pick and choose and it's interesting because you have this thing in like, then I think it's the 1960s. It's the silver age, basically, where DC comics starts publishing things that they call an imaginary story. Which is like, where like, okay. Superman and Batman both settled down and have kids. And then it's like about Superman and Batman's kids going off and having adventures. And it's like, they always say at the start of every one of these stories, this didn't really happen. This is an imaginary story about Superman and Batman.
[00:16:17] And like, Alan Moore, the famous comics writer, thought this was hilarious.
Annalee: [00:16:24] I mean, it is.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:24] And so at one point in the ‘80s, he writes a Superman comic and he's like, this is an imaginary story, but aren't they all? Meaning, yeah, every single story about Superman is imaginary. It's not like there's some that—
Annalee: [00:16:37] I love that, though.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:37] Are documented with hard evidence in the historical record. And it's just this idea that certain stories and then DC later has like a thing called Elseworlds where it's like, well, Batman became a vampire, but that didn't really happen in real life.
[00:16:50] In real life, Batman isn't a vampire. And it's like, again, like…
Annalee: [00:16:53] Okay, good to know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:54] It's just like, you know, because people do care about, like, you don't want to pick up a Batman comic and be like, so wait, is he still a vampire now? I don't know. It's this idea that everything ought to count, or you should say that it doesn't count, gets kind of really thorny after a while.
[00:17:11] And people just love to argue about this stuff because fans love to argue in general.
Annalee: [00:17:14] It’s also what leads to things like the scandal over Black elves in, Lord of the Rings, right? Because that's not how it really happened, and it leads to people making bizarre claims as if there's some kind of real history behind it. Which they would be wrong about if they were talking about actual medieval history. There were lots and lots of people intermixing all over the place.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:40] There were plenty of medieval people of color. Yeah.
Annalee: [00:17:42] Yeah, and also, like people coming from the Americas to places and coming from Africa and coming from Asia into Europe and out of Europe. And anyway, people were intertwingling for a long, long time.
[00:17:53] Yeah. So it's really interesting because what do you do if you want to trim out a piece of the story that now feels Like it isn't culturally relevant anymore or that's culturally problematic like that's a whole other question that I think fans deal with a lot in fanfic. You see a lot of fanfic where people are like, can we just do can we just do Star Wars without all of the offensive racial stereotypes in it. Or, there's the Phantom edit where Jar Jar Binks is gone, so we don't have to deal with the horror of that character.
[00:18:26] So that's another question, and also I've seen people do fanfic about narratives that they actually don't really like the original narrative, but they do like one or two of the characters and they kind of rescue those characters and place them in new contexts. So, I think that's another way we play with the canon.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:45] And it's interesting to think about fanfic as like a safety valve for this whole canon question because it's like a way of just sidestepping it entirely and being like, much like those imaginary stories where Batman becomes a vampire or has kids who are bat kids, it’s like, yeah, these are definitely not part of the canon, but that frees us up. It frees us from this cage that we've become trapped in and that's the thing that really is, like at a certain point canon does become like a cage and you know, coming back to the notion that both ideas of canon are kind of the same thing, that when we argue about is this part of the canon and did this really happen? They both really come down to value judgments.
[00:19:32] When people want a story to not be canon, when people want a story to have not happened. It's usually because they think that story sucks. They think that was a bad story. They think it ruined some aspect of the narrative and they just want it gone to preserve what they like about the narrative. And similarly, when there's a story that people think is really awesome, they want it to really count and they also want it to be something we hold up as being essential and central and important.
[00:19:59] And so it's like about kind of sorting stories into piles of like discard, keep, and then the ones that are just like the extra special stories that we love the most. Which I think is a very fannish impulse of wanting to categorize and sort and stuff. But it also just it becomes very elitist, it becomes very draconian and like I'm going to impose my framework on everybody else of which stories should be loved and which stories should count.
[00:20:29] And, you know, there are people out there for whom the story you hate the most is their favorite story and that's just life, you know?
Annalee: [00:20:33] I think you're right. I mean, you're what you're saying is that it's gatekeeping, basically. And it's vibe gatekeeping because part of what we like about these stories, unless there's some sort of political or other social issue that we're trying to grapple with. It's like, I just like this character.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:52] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:20:52] Like for me, like when I watched Deep Space Nine, like I would love just nothing but Odo fanfic. I think there's other people who might not feel that way about Odo, you know what I mean?
Charlie Jane: [00:21:03] Those people are fools!
Annalee: [00:21:04] Odo might be an acquired taste. I don't know.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:07] Odo is the best.
Annalee: [00:21:09] And he did have a great romance arc, which felt a little bit in a way, like it was fan fiction just for me.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:15] I did love that.
Annalee: [00:21:15] That got inserted into the story.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:17] Yeah, I mean I think that basically what we have to do is A, kind of recognize that everybody gets their own personal canon and that there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that that's part of the beauty of fandom is that like I get to love what I love. You get to love what you love.
Annalee: [00:21:31] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:31] If I wanna say, yeah, Batman was a vampire for five years and every time I read a Batman story I'm like thinking about how he used to be a vampire and how hard that must be for him. to like no longer be a vampire.
Annalee: [00:21:43] And like, in recovery from, from vampiredom
Charlie Jane: [00:21:45] And I'm allowed to think that, and you can't stop me from thinking that. But also, I think that for this whole question of which stories count. For these long, long, long-running things, you just have to keep it kind of simple. All you should need to know about Wonder Woman is she's an Amazon, she won a contest, she left home, she's out doing awesome stuff now.
[00:22:05] And like, you don't need to know whether or not she became a goddess at one point or if she beheaded a dude or whether all this other stuff happened. That's just gravy. That's just like icing on the pudding.
Annalee: [00:22:15] Yeah, I don’t think that most people who pick up a comic book or a book or start watching a show care at all about that stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:26] Yeah, this is really just the diehard fans fanning out about stuff, which I love fandom, but sometimes it does get a little gatekeeper-y and a little draconian. And I feel like the thing that really unites both versions of the idea of canon is that it's about creating an inner circle of the serious aficionados who know more about this than the average person.
[00:22:45] And it’s just a little bit hostile to newcomers and it definitely can be used for gatekeeping.
[00:22:52] And, you know, speaking of things that can create huge barriers and possibly make people feel unwelcome, when we come back from our break, we're going to talk about tsunamis that happened in inland bodies like lakes and rivers and like why those things can be so intense and so destructive.
[00:23:07] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:13] We're incredibly lucky to be joined by Dr. Aggeliki Barberopoulou, an assistant research professor at the USC Tsunami Research Center. She's researched tsunamis triggered by the 2002 Denali earthquake in Lake Union, Seattle. And Dr. Barberopoulou also researched the conditions of the Seattle Basin that caused large waves in Lake Union and surrounding bodies of water during earthquakes.
[00:23:13] Thank you, welcome to the show, Dr. Barberopoulou.
Aggeliki: [00:23:38] Thank you very much for the invitation. It's always great to talk about my work.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:43] Yeah, it's so exciting. So, you know, I hadn't known until just now that tsunamis can happen in lakes and other inland bodies of water. How does that happen? Is it usually due to earthquakes or are there other reasons it can happen?
Aggeliki: [00:23:58] So, there's two different things that you are touching upon here. One is what is causing those waves. And the other is where they happen. Obviously, because they're water waves, they have to happen in a, obviously a water basin, whether it's open or it's partially closed or it's enclosed, it's inland, it has nothing to do with what is causing it.
[00:24:22] So it can be caused by similar causes, whether it's inland or it's actually in the open waters.
Annalee: [00:24:29] So what are some of those causes? Like, Charlie mentioned earthquake. I think we're familiar with a lot of earthquake-caused tsunamis, but are there other things that can cause a tsunami that we might not be thinking of?
Aggeliki: [00:24:43] Yeah, so the earthquake-generated tsunamis are definitely the most common ones, but you do have landslides. Those are also fairly common. And sometimes you can have them concurrently.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:52] Oh!
Aggeliki: [00:24:52] So sometimes it's kind of hard because you have an earthquake, and you do have a tsunami, and maybe an earthquake that is not supposed to cause a very large tsunami, and you do get these because you do have landslides happening at the same time.
[00:25:06] Now, landslides can happen also without an earthquake happening. So they can happen from all sorts of reasons. You can have some aerial, submarine landslides. So part of the landslide can happen on the ground and part of it can happen under the water. You can have also things like, let's say a glacier collapsing into water.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:29] Oh, wow.
Aggeliki: [00:25:29] And you can cause those waves. You can have meteorological-induced tsunamis, the so-called meteo-tsunamis.
Annalee: [00:25:37] So you can have a weather-caused tsunami, like just the wind gets so rough.
Aggeliki: [00:25:44] Yes. You have the, so-called meteo-tsunamis. This is not a one that I actually particularly study, but yes, you can have meteorological. So, anything that would displace, vertically, the water basically, could cause tsunamis. You can have, also, volcanic eruptions.
Annalee: [00:26:00] Oh, wow. Totally. That makes sense.
Aggeliki: [00:26:00] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:02] So a lot of people probably like, if you live on the coast, you kind of accept that, yeah, there might be like some pretty damaging waves. And that's the thing you, that's a risk you take if you live on the coast, but how much damage do people have to worry about if they live alongside of a lake or other inland body of water? Like how damaging can these events get?
Aggeliki: [00:26:22] This is actually a great question. I mean, theoretically and practically the same ways that tsunamis cause damage when you're in the open waters can happen also inland. But I looked at a paper that was actually published, recently, 2019, and was based on data that resides with the National Geophysical Data Center, NAIC, it's part of NOAA. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It's the global tsunami historical database, and they were summarizing some basic statistics about tsunamis in the last 25 years.
[00:27:02] Just to give you a bit of, of an idea between 1992 and 2016, there were (2,290?) 290 tsunamis that happened in those 25 years. Six were in rivers and lakes. That can give you a little bit of an idea that it’s not as common. You can kind of probably, logically, if you think about how big the oceans are and the different big seas, probably you would expect having so many different sources that can generate tsunamis, that that probably is something you would expect.
[00:27:46] The damage that can happen from tsunamis can be structural damage if you have facilities, buildings, through flooding, through scouring. You can have, basically alteration of the topography. You can have large erosion, and also you can have generation of currents around ports.
Annalee: [00:28:11] So you've studied the Denali earthquake that kind of hit the Seattle area, but it also caused waves elsewhere. Can you tell us what the Denali earthquake was and kind of where we felt its effects in bodies of water?
Aggeliki: [00:28:26] So, basically what happens is we have an earthquake in Alaska. The same thing actually happened in Alaska, 1964. but the Denali earthquake was the inspiration for my PhD work.
[00:28:39] So, what happened is there is an earthquake and there is obviously a rupture at the fault and then you get waves. So, the energy is propagating outside of the source and it travels through the earth. High frequencies dissipate quickly and then the long period waves travel large distances. So, these are the waves that you might cause swaying of hanging things, dizziness, they might cause dizziness and you might feel something like this and not knowing why you felt it. Now, these long period waves caused damage in houseboats in Lake Union. By basically causing water waves in the lake. And the theory was behind this, that if you think that a lake is almost like a glass or cup that holds like a liquid that is embedded, imagine the ground moving with the lake, and then those waves are caused.
Annalee: [00:29:41] So is it almost like the long wave of the earthquake is propagated into the water?
Aggeliki: [00:29:48] So there’s different theories about how these waves are generated. For me, because Lake Union is also fairly small, the theory was that it's almost, it's the same as having a water tank on top of a shaking table. So basically, the ground, the lake is moving with the ground, and then you have these waves generated and these basically caused the damage in the house boats in sewer and water lines because obviously there was stretching of these lines and those broke.
[00:30:16] So we collected this information at the beginning of my PhD studies and we did some also, an analysis of seismic records from an accelerometer network in Seattle and we kind of confirmed earlier findings of another great researcher from the USGS that the presence of thick sediments that are in the general Seattle region and in Washington state amplify those motions and we found that the water waves were actually coinciding with areas of thick sediments that amplify certain waves.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:02] Oh!
Annalee: [00:31:02] So sediment is just kind of like a loose, sandy soil instead of rock?
Aggeliki: [00:31:07] Yes. And in Seattle, we have a lot of these unconsolidated sediments that are not well compacted because of glaciers being present 20,000 years ago that melted and left all these behind.
Annalee: [00:31:19] It’s all the junk that the glaciers picked up as they moved along. So they were just pushing a bunch of junk.
Aggeliki: [00:31:26] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:26] And they amplify the waves? They amplify the earthquakes or they conduct the earthquakes?
Aggeliki: [00:31:31] So, these long period waves that I was looking at that traveled to Seattle from Alaska, were amplified at the range, if I remember correctly, it's like 0.02 to 0.4 Hz.
[00:31:44] And we hypothesized that these frequencies are the ones that actually influenced the presence of the water waves that we saw. And there was some similar hypothesis being made for the Alaska 1964. Observations from that earthquake were also collected by the United States Geological Survey along the path that the seismic waves traveled.
[00:32:20] And so we were able with some observation collections and then seismic analysis to be able to kind of connect the two and say we find these observations at the same locations where we have amplification of long period waves, seismic waves, and these are also coinciding with very, very thick sediments, more than two kilometers. And we think these are connected.
Annalee: [00:32:42] So basically, you get an earthquake in Alaska, the waves are propagating out and then they hit these thick sandy sediments. And that makes the earthquake more intense, basically?
Aggeliki: [00:32:53] The motion, yes.
Annalee: [00:32:55] And then it hits Lake Union, and so the motion has been amplified, it gets to Lake Union, and it's basically Lake Union is this cup that's stuck inside the shaking rock and sediment.
Aggeliki: [00:33:07] And of course Lake Union has, because of its shape, also has characteristic ways that it wants to resonate, right? Like if we have a taller building, shorter building, the same thing with the lakes. So, I did some numerical modeling to see if I'm shaking this lake with the particular type of ground motion, what happens?
[00:33:31] So, I did a little bit of that. This was the first time that a very complex shaped lake, was done. We also had some hypothesis that because there is some human intervention in the lake and there are vertical walls, maybe that might have also played their role in the sense that they act a little bit like, how do they call this, like, wave generators.
Annalee: [00:33:58] Yeah, yeah, they use paddles in, in wave generators. Yeah. So, because the walls are so vertical, they're like, the water is like splashing against it really hard and then sloshing back really hard. Is that the idea?
Aggeliki: [00:34:12] Yeah, so this is some stuff that we, made assumptions for. Of course, there could be bias that, you know, observations are only where people submitted things. The bad thing is we don't have water wave collections, observations, from the lake. So we, we only could work with, you know, damage in these locations, observations here, there, and stuff like that.
Annalee: [00:34:35] How big did the waves get? Were they quite extraordinary?
Aggeliki: [00:34:40] That's actually what we don't know. We actually don't have measurements of those waves. We only know the damage. And so, we are assuming the bigger the waves, the bigger the damage, because obviously the houseboats have a range of motion. And so, these are the kind of the difficult thing about this kind of waves is that we don't really have a nice set of records. I have been very, adamant at collecting any kind of observation of waves like this. And I have collected recently some from international locations, but they're always very difficult to collect. It’s data that can be lost very easily. I feel, I don't want to say proud, but I want to say very much representing these standing waves and studied them because it is not a very fashionable topic. And so, people haven't been paying as much attention. And every time somebody gets excited about this topic or wants to talk about this, I really want to jump in and talk about them.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:49] No, it's super exciting. So, part of what's fascinating about inland tsunamis is that you can get huge amounts of destruction or huge waves from tiny, tiny bodies of water. Like, you know, you think of like the ocean, of course it's going to cause a huge wave, but like I was reading up on this, you know, tsunami that happened in late 2020 at Jack Elliot Creek in British Columbia, Canada.
[00:36:15] And I was, you look at the map, Jack Elliot Creek is a tiny, it's a creek. It's a tiny little, like, basically like a stream, but you have a landslide in late 2020 that causes a tsunami that's a hundred meters tall that causes massive habitat destruction, huge amounts of damage. It's like felt as far away as Australia. Like how can such a tiny body of water produce such a huge wave?
Aggeliki: [00:36:39] Definitely, there's a lot of things that actually play a role in the damage that happens, in the local topographic and pathometric characteristics definitely have an effect like in focusing. A lot of times you will see large variability in nearby areas, like one area will have very large waves and the nearby you don't have. Or you might have damage in some area. And this is definitely a result of focusing. And focusing can happen fairly close to the coastline that affects, or it can happen a little bit further on shore within the continental self. If you have things that actually send the energy towards the particular location.
[00:37:26] One location that seems to be a tsunami magnet, and you may have seen this in the literature, it's actually in Northern California in Crescent City. The reason it's a magnet is because of features that are in the bathymetry of the Pacific Ocean, west of Crescent City of obviously in in the deeper waters.
[00:37:26] But also it depends on where the tsunami initiates. If it is created, let's say in Japan, further north, further south, there is a lot of islands, island arcs, that are standing in the way and they send waves, either diffract waves, either reflect waves, or refract waves. And this is the reason you get a train of waves and you might get larger waves that are coming later.
[00:38:19] So there's a lot of things that play a role.
Annalee: [00:38:21] Just to clarify, bathymetry is the kind of topology of the land underneath the water.
Aggeliki: [00:38:28] Yes, you can say it's the morphology or the details of the bottom of the ocean. It's definitely not flat. It does not look like a swimming pool, obviously. If you look at, the NOAA animations of famous recent or historical tsunamis, it does show very prominently the effect of this, of the presence of the islands and all these sort of, I don't want to say, I'm not sure if I should say asymmetries or all these obstacles, let's say, that are in the ocean basin.
Annalee: [00:39:06] So, I listened to this and it's a little bit, scary to think that some small body of water could produce a giant wave or unbeknownst to me, I could be living near, like, a really dangerous bathymetry under the water that would really focus a wave. So, I'm wondering, are there early warning systems? Are there ways that we can forecast when a tsunami might be about to hit so that people are able to evacuate? How does that work?
Aggeliki: [00:39:37] Yes, there is tsunami forecasting in place, and there is different organizations that are involved in these. The tsunami warning centers obviously are the ones that are involved in observing the first signs in the measurements that are being made.
[00:39:53] Let's say there is an earthquake. There is messages that are sent out by the National, Weather Service. There is the tsunami list that I also get messages from, and other scientists get from, and the Tsunami Warning Center sends messages to, that is, a partnership, I believe, from UNESCO and some other organizations.
Annalee: [00:40:15] What’s the tsunami list? Is that, like, an email list that I can subscribe to, or?
Aggeliki: [00:40:20] You may be able to subscribe to, it's called ITIC. I think you can find it if you do Google search. Okay. Tsunami warning messages. Those messages also appear on a website. We always look at them because the first messages that come up if there is a, let's say, submarine earthquake, they always send messages there and they say, some brief, description of the area where the earthquake has happened and if it is common to expect tsunamis from that region with that magnitude, et cetera, et cetera.
Annalee: [00:40:56] Are there any inland lakes that might be particularly prone to tsunamis? Like if, if someone's living, near Lake Erie or Lake Michigan, should they be more aware of this kind of stuff? Like what we call the Great Lakes, the inland seas.
Aggeliki: [00:41:15] Yeah, so for example, Lake Washington is on top of a fault line. So if you have lakes that are on top of faults that could potentially displace the water, then you might get something like this. Also, if you have, let's say, unconsolidated sediments, like we have, there is an area which has landslides and it's prone to landslides from also precipitation because the sediments are loose, then you definitely can have such waves. And so I think historically there should be documentation of this.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:58] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:41:58] So it sounds like the things that people should be thinking about though are do you live near a lake that's near a known fault line, but also, do you live near an area that has these huge sedimentary deposits? I mean, because I think that's something that people don't think about when they're buying a house or moving to a place. They're not like, how, how deep is the sedimentary deposit here? You know, they're not, that's not like something that comes up as, as we try to plan our future safety.
Aggeliki: [00:42:28] So, I think when somebody, let's say, buys a house, I believe there is some kind of report that I think they can get that shows basically, any kind of relevant geology and what kind of threat they might have, let's say from landslides or things like that. And so, I think that is definitely good to look at.
[00:42:51] On the other hand, I feel that if you live in an area, it's always good to be informed about, you know, the characteristics. I think it's part of the history of your area and I always find that it is connecting us to the area we live in. I particularly like studying historical earthquakes, myself.
[00:43:11] And so I always say I like to go back to my roots and look at that because I think it's interwined with the area that you live in. And I think it is very exciting to know some stuff.
[00:43:21] For example, Seattle, anything, the geology and everything that you see around is a result of some processes. I think it's very exciting to know about all these and know a little bit about your city or the general region. And I think that would protect you also from, specific threats.
[00:43:41] Yes, so it is good to know about emergency plans and knowing, you know, the local or your state emergency management reports and pages. Familiarize yourself. I think it's a good thing to do.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:56] For sure. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Barberopoulou. Could you tell people where to find you on the internet?
Annalee: [00:44:03] Find your work?
Aggeliki: [00:44:04] Yes. So, people can actually find me. I work currently on the East Coast. I am at Tufts University in Boston. I split, most of my time is spent teaching students, but also I do research, I do public outreach, and I actually do work and collaborate with high school students as well. So I encourage people to write to me emails if they're interested in finding more and I can send them materials about my work.
Annalee: [00:44:34] Great. Thank you so much.
Aggeliki: [00:44:36] Thank you very much.
[00:44:37] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
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[00:45:07] Thanks so much to our incredible, heroic, just wonderful, badass producer Naya Harmon Thanks also to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for our music, and thanks again to you for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode, but if you're on our Patreon, you get a mini episode next week, plus we'll be seeing you on Discord.
[00:45:30] Bye!
Annalee: [00:45:30] Bye!
[00:45:30] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]