Milton rapidly intensified to a Category 5 hurricane late Monday morning.
Within hours, Milton strengthened to a Category 2, then a Category 3, then a Category 4 and finally a Category 5.
Milton now ranks as the third-greatest 24-hour wind speed intensification for a hurricane in the Atlantic Basin. (Records are based on data since the satellite era began in the 1960s.)
Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven wrote a book called Lucifer’s Hammer about a comet hitting the Earth. There’s a part where all the surfers in the ocean off of L.A. know they’re going to die, so they decide to ride the tsunami and get taken out one by one as they get smashed into buildings.
Unfortunately, at least from videos I’ve seen of the Indian Ocean tsunami and the Fukushima tsunami, tsunamis don’t really “break” like good surfing waves and instead seem to act more like a large swell that keeps going instead of ebbing.
(A mega-tsunami from a comet impact might be so large it would act differently, though.)
I’ll be honest, it’s one of the least believable parts of a book which overall reads as quite plausible, but it’s a fun chapter. Neither of the authors are/were scientists, so they were bound to get some things wrong. It was also written almost 50 years ago, so I’m guessing the science they did work with has been supplanted in a lot of ways since then.
That would make for a great scene in a disaster movie.
Honestly, the whole book would make a great miniseries. Probably too much for just one movie.
Too bad Larry Niven is and Jerry Pournelle was such right-wing assholes, because their published some great stuff.
One pancake to go!
I think I heard about the book you were talking about