Mexico earthquake triggers ‘desert tsunami’ 1,500 miles away in Death Valley cave – ‘We don’t know how to handle it’ The earthquake struck off the Pacific coast with far stronger and more destructive force than a tsunami but no casualties were reported. A’super-tsunami’ occurred in the earthquake itself.
The earthquake struck off the Pacific coast with far stronger and more destructive force than a tsunami but no casualties were reported. A’super-tsunami’ occurred in the earthquake itself.
NEW YORK: The tsunami experienced by a US Navy Seal team living in an underground training cave nearly four years ago could have been far larger and potentially far deadlier than initially reported, according to the Navy.
The ‘Big One’ struck on May 27, 2012, just three months after the US Navy’s SEAL-6 unit arrived in the remote region of San Diego, California after a month-long deployment away from home.
A SEAL team member described the ‘Big One’ in a letter to a newspaper the following year.
The quake triggered ‘a chain reaction of events so powerful it made a tsunami more dangerous than a tsunami’, the former soldier said in an email to the San Diego Union-Tribune in December of that year.
‘I believe that there was a tsunami at the bottom of the ocean (that) was more destructive than the initial quake.’
But US military sources told Reuters in 2013 that the ‘Big One’ was actually a magnitude 6.7 earthquake.
In a sign of how difficult it is to learn about events like these, the National Safety Council in Washington DC only learned about the second ‘Big One’ in 2013.
The Navy SEAL team were in the remote Pacific off the coast of Mexico, where they trained for a mission in a remote cave – known only as Area 51 – for six weeks.
The team of six SEALs were told that they would be spending a month training in the cave when the earthquake struck, which killed 16 of them.
The SEALs, who were told the cave was under the North American underwater mountain range known as the Central San Andreas Fault, had never experienced an earthquake before, according to US military officials.
The SEAL team
