An earthquake is caused when one tectonic plate is driven under another, the forces involved are almost beyond comprehension, dwarfing anything humans have achieved or ever will. As this event takes place there comes a point when the force equalises, bringing the plates to a halt, where neither is really making any progress, while the billions of tonnes of mass behind each plate continue to push against each other. This enormous compression creates a pent-up marshalling of kinetic energy, the equivalent to the combined power of thousands of hydrogen bombs. Once this force is released, one of the massive plates jolts upwards. When this event happens inland the ground cracks and moves, mountains crumble and cities are toppled.
At sea it transfers its energy to the waters above it. If this materialises in the deep ocean it can accelerate the water into a shockwave, creating a wall of water that can radiate outwards in all directions, capable of reaching speeds of around 800 kilometres per hour. In the deep ocean, this dynamism is barely perceptible at the surface, it being dissipated into the vastness of the waters around it. Any sea-going vessel running in calm conditions within the vicinity of the seabed’s disturbance would only notice an unremarkable swell. If they were operating in rougher conditions, they may not notice anything at all. But when the shockwave makes landfall the local conditions of the coastal areas will depict its next evolution, a tsunami.
Most shorelines have a gradual shallowing as they make landfall. This gradient reduces the speed of the tsunami, but in doing so raises its height, as the enormous pressure created by the speeding volume of water is pushed upwards when it meets the natural wedge of the shallows.
Depending on the local formation of the shoreline, combined with how forceful the earthquake was, the height of a tsunami can reach as high as thirty metres. However, even a relatively low wave can still demonstrate enormous potency from the continuous feed of kinetic energy that powers it.
The Pacific Ocean is the vast expanses of Suijin, the God of water. Like all his oceans it has three masters that rule its dynamism – Tsukiyomi the Moon, Raijin the Weather and Kenrō-Ji-Jin the Earth itself – with each power able to utilise the water’s inherent malleability.
For the Moon and the Weather gods are without doubt powerful forces, dragging and pushing the waters of all the great oceans across the globe from continent to continent to batter coastlines wherever it comes ashore.
However, it is the World itself that decides where those oceans lay. It is by its own spin that the waters are played on the pull of the static one-faced Moon. It is the tectonic movement of its crust that brings design, to shape the giant basins that hold the water within, and it resolves the boundaries of the sea’s land.
The compliant nature of the waters allows the Moon and Weather gods to constantly manipulate its movement, lapping Suijin’s domain submissively around the globe at their command; driving the tides across the edges of Kenrō-Ji-Jin’s realm. Allowing them to bring to all both storm and calm as they please.
This is because Suijin is easily led and enacts with Tsukiyomi and Raijin in carefree abundance. Their memory is as short as their time is immediate, so it is with easy nonchalance that they ignore their status in the Earth’s continuous, imperceptible transformation, and forget their place in the order of things.
It is then that the Great Kenrō-Ji-Jin of the Earth will break its glacial inscrutability. And it is a wrathful lesson he gives, releasing once subjugated demons in its wake.
The Ogress Adachigahara