News > Tsunami scientists are on the hunt for ancient disasters

Tsunami scientists are on the hunt for ancient disasters

A boulder weighing more than 40 tons sits on the sand high above the ocean. Dwarfing every other rock in view, it is conspicuously out of place. The answer to how this massive outlier got here lies not in the vast expanse of the Atacama Desert behind it but in the Pacific Ocean below. Hundreds of years ago, a tsunami slammed into the northern Chilean coast — a wall of water 65 feet high, taller than a six-story building, that swept boulders landward like pebbles.