West’s Super Floods May Wash Over Aging Dams, Scientists Warn

In the late 1980s, a Japanese scientist named Koji Minoura stumbled on a medieval poem that described a tsunami so large it had swept away a castle and killed 1,000 people. Intrigued, Minoura and his team began looking for paleontological evidence of the tsunami beneath rice paddies, and discovered not one but three massive, earthquake-triggered waves that had wracked the Sendai coast over the past 3,000 years. In a 2001 paper, Minoura concluded that the possibility of another tsunami was significant.