Last week I found an article tucked away on the BBC website that described a report into an extraordinary and terrifying event that occurred last year in Alaska.

No it wasn’t Mr Trump ordering a nuclear bomb test in one of the remote areas, but it may well have been equally scary.

In August last year, in the middle of the night in a remote Fjord, which does apparently play host to cruise ship visits, a very large section of a mountain, adjoining the fjord, decided to give way and plummet into the fjord creating hell on earth. Why am I describing it that way you wonder? Well it wasn’t just a pile of dirt and rocks with a few trees. No…. this was 64 million cubic metres of rock, equivalent to 24 Great Pyramids, dropping off the side of the mountain and hurtling into the water below.

Now if you ever dropped a large object into a pool of water that is bounded by steep edges, you can tell me what happens. Yes, as the stone or earth plummets into the water, it displaces the water creating a wave that spreads out very fast from where the stone or earth entered. Given the sheer volume of rock plunging into the fjord, it displaced a large part of the water and that water decided to turn into a wave which raced down the fjord as it had nowhere else to go. But get this…. how high do you think that wave was?

Well it was around 500 metres high. To give you an idea of how high that is, it is about 150 metres higher than the Auckland Sky Tower. Next time you are in Auckland, stand under the Skytower and look up and imagine a wave 150 metres higher than that coming towards you at the speed of a freight train. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t really have time to crap yourself, let alone run away from it.

Now apart from the sheer magnitude of this event, which really went unnoticed in much of the world’s mainstream media, we should all be thanking our lucky stars that there wasn’t one of those cruise ships anchored overnight in that fjord, with 6000 happy tourists admiring the grandeur of the towering cliffs and deep waters. If that was the case, the world would be stunned by the collective loss of those 6000 tourists and their large cruise boat because there was no surviving that wall of water coming out of the darkness.

Now I know a little bit about tsunamis and how they can happen, and what they can do if they do happen. For starters I don’t really need to think of a more recent example that the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that took over a quarter of a million lives. But tsunamis can be caused in all sorts of situations. Here are a couple that can occur anywhere actually. 1) A large space object or hunk of space rock plummets into the.Pacific Ocean at around 10,000 kmh. 2) An excessively large mountain, adjoining a deep sea area is jolted into slipping rapidly into that deep water and creating a very large displacement wave. 3) The world’s oceans are littered with deep trenches often bordered by steep undersea cliffs of thousands of metres in height. An earthquake can displace that cliff that then plummets to the bottom of the trench. Ok it’s all happening underwater, but that wave stuff has to go somewhere. 4) One of those mega tectonic plates sitting under portions of the world’s oceans decides to rise up and drop down again. This was kind of what happened in 2004.

You are probably wondering why I am ranting on about this, but the mind blowing power and destructive energy that would be released in any of these scenarios would dwarf anything that mankind thinks they can control. We throw vast quantities of energy and concern into global conflicts that seem to be constantly happening, plus we agonise about issues we believe we are causing like global warming and polar ice change etc, and while these are issues we all should be thinking about and looking for ways to reduce our destructive behaviours, we must not forget that Mother Nature has the last say on anything we may have to deal with. In the blink of an eye, Nature can treat us to a display of unimagineable power and any arrogance we have thinking we can control events is quickly destroyed before we can even react.

We live on a knife edge and only those few humans who have ventured into space have ever appreciated how fragile and tenuous our life here actually is.

I still cant get over the thought of a 500 metre wall of water coming at me. In fact it blows my mind folks and it should blow yours.