The Tallest Wave Ever Recorded Keeps Coming Back

In July 1958, water climbed 1,720 feet up a mountainside in Alaska — higher than the Empire State Building, antenna and all. Three fishing boats were anchored in the bay that night. This is what happened to them, and why the famous number is wrong in a way that makes the story worse. Lituya Bay is a narrow T-shaped inlet on the Gulf of Alaska, with glaciers at its head, a 500-metre entrance, and the Fairweather Fault running directly underneath it. On the ninth of July 1958, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake tore the fault open along roughly 200 kilometres. Rock fell into Gilbert Inlet, and the water went up the opposite slope and took the forest with it. But the trees recorded more than one wave. Older trimlines run along those slopes — 1853 or 1854, around 1874, around 1899, and 1936. Four giant waves before 1958, roughly one every quarter of a century, in a bay nobody was counting. And in September 2023, a fjord in Greenland produced a signal that seismometers all over the planet picked up for nine days, and not one person saw the wave that made it. What this film covers: · why this particular bay is built to do this · what the three crews saw, and which of them came back · what "524 metres" actually measures, and why it is not the height of a wave · what the forest records about the waves before 1958 · why scientists now think these waves are becoming more likely Sources Miller, D.J., 1960. Giant Waves in Lituya Bay, Alaska. USGS Professional Paper 354-C. USGS Open-File Report 03-100, 2003 — Lituya Bay run-up, 524 m. Svennevig et al., 2024. Science — the 2023 Dickson Fjord landslide and seiche. Every shot in this film is a reconstruction, generated with AI. Nothing here is archive footage. The numbers, dates, names and sources are real and checked. Chapters 00:00 The line in the forest 02:04 A bay built for disaster 03:32 Three boats that night 04:35 The earthquake hits 05:54 Water climbs the mountain 07:25 The crews face the wave 09:04 The forest remembers 11:01 What 524 metres means 13:09 A record becomes a warning 14:49 The nine-day seismic mystery 16:17 The collapse in Dickson Fjord 18:16 A wave trapped in a fjord 20:25 Tracy Arm: five hours early 22:08 What the ice was holding 24:22 Can mountains give warning? 26:04 Where the next line forms