Any tsunami video I look at barely looks like a 20 feet wave hitting shore. But wikipedia tells me there have been dozens of 100+ feet tsunamis even in the last 10 years.
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Tsunamis don’t look like a big tall wall that breaks over land.
Waves break (fall over forming a tube of air inside a tunnel of water) when the water depth equals 1.3 times the height of the wave.
So, a 6 foot tall wave at the beach will always break when the water depth is about 8 feet. And a 6 inch tall wave on the shore of a choppy lake will break when the water is about 8 inches deep.
The scale is always the same.
So a 100 foot tall rogue wave in the ocean breaks if the water depth is 130 feet.
There are very few areas with shorelines that drop that steeply away from land, so the tall waves always break further out to sea.
But just because a wave breaks, doesn’t mean that that water stops moving. It’s just not moving the way we picture big waves.
That entire volume of water still hits the shore and comes onto the land, but it does it laying down instead of standing up.
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