Whenever there’s a tsunami in the movies it’s always a 100 foot tall wall of water instead of the rolling waves we see in real life. Could a wave actually get that high and make it to land?
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> Could a wave actually get that high and make it to land?
[Yes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZTx0XBx4hk). But these aren’t tsunamis.
Tsunamis are as damaging as they are not because of their height but because of their length. A tsunami can have a wavelength of hundreds of kilometers, so there is a huge amount of water behind it unlike a normal wave that breaks and dissipates when it hits land, a tsunami behaves more like a rapidly rising tide (hence why they’re sometimes known as “tidal waves”).
Note that tsunamis triggered by landslides rather than seismic activity can be *much* larger. In 1958, a landslide in Lituya Bay, Alaska, triggered a megatsunami that caused damage 524m (1719ft) above the waterline. This is higher than the Empire State building. Such an event has, as far as I’m aware, never been filmed, so who knows what it would look like.
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