In his book entitled Disasters, author John Godwin describes the fallout from three tsunamis, or “killer waves.”
A. Hilo, Hawaii, May, 1960. At this time a 100–foot wave traveling at 550 mph hit the coast, drowning 665 people and causing property damage of 50 million dollars.
B. Lisbon, Portugal, November 1, 1755. This city was hit by a seventy–foot wave which drowned 65,000 people.
C. Indonesia, May 20, 1883. On this date the volcano Krakatoa exploded and caused a 150–foot wave to rush ashore. It sank thirty-three European vessels, buried many islands beneath a nine–foot layer of mud, destroyed over 1,000 coastal cities, and left over 50,000 dead in its terrible wake.
Dr. Henry Morris, Ph.D., and expert in hydrology (the nature of moving water) wrote one of the most descriptive summaries of the destruction wrought by a worldwide flood:
Visualize, then, a great hydraulic cataclysm bursting upon the present world, with currents of water pouring perpetually from the skies and erupting continuously from the earth’s crust, all over the world, for weeks on end, until the entire globe was submerged, accompanied by outpourings of magma from the mantle, gigantic earth movements, landslides, tsunamis, and explosions.
Sooner or later all land animals would perish. Many, but not all, marine animals would perish. Human beings would swim, run, climb, and attempt to escape the floods but, unless a few managed to ride out the cataclysm in unusually strong watertight sea-going vessels, they would eventually all drown or otherwise perish.
Soils would soon erode away and trees and plants be uprooted and carried down toward the sea in great mats on flooding streams. Eventually, the hills and mountains themselves would disintegrate and flow downstream in great landslides and turbidity [p. 1196] currents. Slabs of rock would crack and bounce and gradually be rounded into boulders and gravel and sand. Vast seas of mud and rock would flow downriver, trapping many animals and rafting great masses of plants with them.
On the ocean bottom, upwelling sediments and subterranean waters and magmas would entomb hordes of invertebrates. The waters would undergo rapid changes in heat and salinity, great slurries would form, and immense amounts of chemicals would be dissolved and dispersed throughout the seaways.
Eventually, the land sediments and waters would commingle with those in the ocean. Finally, the sediments would settle out as the waters slowed down, dissolved chemicals would precipitate out at times and places where the salinity and temperature permitted, and great beds of sediment, soon to be cemented into rock, would be formed all over the world.
The above, of course, is only the barest outline of the great variety of phenomena that would accompany such a cataclysm. (Scientific Creationism, pp. 117–118)