Is that silver lining silver lining.

Hi, I'm Morgan Page, and I'm a geophysicist with the U S Geological Survey in Pasadena, California My name's Mike and go from the tsunami program manager for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration computer Glick, hydrologists and climatologists from the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California Today we're going to be reviewing some of Hollywood's biggest disaster films and commenting on how realistic they are.

This is toward the end of the movie, and the rock recognizes boats are tilting in a way that suggests that the water is receding.

Being pulled out like that.

He's right to be thinking about that.

We've just had this strong shaking Tsunamis do tend to be associated with that type of shaking when you involve water.

But here's where it starts to come off the rails.

What they're depicting here is a giant tsunami generated somewhere out in the Pacific, and there it is right there.

I don't think the world has seen this large of a tsunami wave.

You would need a major oceanic subduction zone type of an event to generate that type of a wave.

That mechanism does not exist in this portion of the Pacific.

Maybe we get some fracturing the extension of the San Andreas out there, but would all be very kind of small.

Justin, First order Because of San Andreas, the land is moving horizontally.

It is a bit harder to get tsunamis.

You need either vertical motion of a fault to get a tsunami or you need something, Worsley.

The shaking causes an underwater landslide, and so that gives you the movement of the ground under the bay.

But you need something a little different than you would have been, say, its objections on Earth, this one, the way its depicted you can safely scratch off the list.

But there is a long history of these movies taking out the Golden Gate Bridge.

That's true.

If that was on your checklist, take out Golden Gate Bridge.

This is probably the best way to do it.

I'm with you on that, Peter.

So when the earthquake hits the house, Amanda Peet and her family, they actually do the right thing in this scene.

Initially, they drop, cover and hold on.

They get under a stable piece of furniture, which is offering them protection from all of the falling objects.

But then John Cusack arrives and tell them to get out of there.

Now.

Their house collapses.

Certainly after so I guess it was the right call, given that that happened.

But in reality, a wood frame house like this is one of the safest places to be in an earthquake.

The scale of what we're seeing is grossly exaggerated in this clip of a huge false start popping up all over the place how they're trying to outrun the seismic waves in their car, which is impossible because they're too fast on Earthquake occurs when a fault that's been under tremendous stress suddenly begins to slip one side of the fault moving relative to the other side, and that causes a generation of seismic waves.

We could get P waves of the first thing we feel, followed by s waves and followed by surface waves.

And if you're far from an earthquake of surface way, which is a rolling kind of motion, it's typically the main thing that you do have the rolling motion of the earth.

But we're talking about sending me enters, not meters.

We're talking much smaller scales of destruction than what we're seeing in this movie.

This is pretty unrealistic.

One thing I liked about it that they family originally did the right thing.

We've been completely undone when they had this over the top ground motions that destroyed what would have been probably a pretty safe place to be in there.

So we're in Antarctica.

Scientists are drilling ice cores, which is something that we do.

There's a tremendous amount of information you get from ancient ice cores in Antarctica about climate, about whether about atmospheric conditions and then, like a good crazy scientist, has been spending his life collecting data.

He jumps across the crevice to try and save some of the high scores.

The day after tomorrow is in some ways the best of the really crazy disaster movies.

We do see ice shelves breaking off in Antarctica, enormous eye shells the size of states, in part as a result of human caused climate change.

And as temperatures go up, we're beginning to see fracturing of those shelves, sitting mostly on water at the moment, and that may accelerate the movement of land ice into the oceans and that's what raises sea level.

I didn't do anything.

Speed we see here is not realistic.

What's happened here is a very fast crevice forming in the ice shelf, moving quickly.

It's typically a little bit slower than that, but that's what we're seeing here.

The whole thing off.

That's what's happening in the movie volcano.

It's so hot.

The rubber on his sneakers is melting, the struggling to move as he carries an injured person on the subway car.

Wow, there's like lava just flowing down from somewhere windows, air braking.

Oh, and there's just No, I just love it everywhere.

Flames.

It's really far, and he's got this guy in his bag.

Oh, he jumped as far as it can go.

Far as I know about interaction between human body and lava, the seams realistic.

If you're in a situation where there's a slow moving lava flow, you can get fairly close, and it's not going to immediately kill you.

It is realistic something until lava would kill you.

So far as I know, it seems plausible, using concrete barriers to stop a lava flow and using water to stop a lava flow.

Both of these things have been done in the real world, you can sometimes use concrete barriers to divert the lava.

That's a little bit easier than you're just stopping.

It is gonna keep coming, but it's been done in Hawaii and Italy.

So in the movie, it's depicted that there is a volcano right under last Angelus.

And just to be clear, there is not a volcano right under Los Angeles.

There are places in the world where you do get volcanoes, but Los Angeles is not one of those places here in their life.

It's one of several possibilities.

It's an iconic scene cow flying by and the count doesn't look all that perturbed.

They're wondering, Is that the same cow?

Different cow, another cow?

Probably the scene that everyone remembers from this movie.

There is a lot of things that get, you know, sucked up into these and distributed around so including livestock.

The one quibble I have with this scene is that when they first see the cow goes going one way and then the cow next time I see it is going the other way.

That would make sense if they're driving right through the tornado, I guess, But it looks like the tornado is off to the side.

So I mean, a tornado is not just gonna suddenly switched direction.

That would not be realistic.

But overall, you know livestock.

We think that's reasonable.

No, in the National Weather Service contributed to some technical advice and ideas to the filmmakers.

And I think a lot of what's shown here shows that natural evolution and trying to better understand these systems.

Where's my truck?

One of the fundamental characteristics of almost all of these disaster is that they try to build on things that could be plausible but toe amore, extreme sense.

And so the movie starts with a series of clips from real extreme events flooding, tornadoes drying out of reservoirs.

The worry, of course, is that we're now modifying the climate in a way that will make these Maur extreme events even more damaging to civilization.

And now it's transitioning into massive CG ice storms, heat wave in Madrid that kills millions of people and the global response.

The world is coming together and producing what in the business we call geo engineering engineering options for mitigating the consequences of human influence on climate, and they're launching satellites most of the geo engineering that were talking about now is really dressed talk.

There are ideas of things that we can do.

One could argue that a massive tree planting campaign or building seawalls is small scale geo engineering.

But the scale of the geo engineering described in Geo Storm, the planetary satellite systems that's not in our near future in the movie the core birds is flying right into monuments.

Oh, they're crashing into windows Now It's all Hitchcock and everyone's fleeing so that one of the premises of the movie, the core, is that the outer core of the earth has stopped spinning, so therefore, there's no longer any magnetic field.

So if there's no magnetic field honor, the compass wouldn't work.

And birds use the magnetic field to migrate, so they use it to find the direction when they're migrating.

The problem with this clip is that the birds would still be able to see even without a magnetic field.

They shouldn't just be flying into buildings and statues for no reason, however, to navigate site no long range stuff.

Here's a world where something has gone horribly wrong, and it's a world of dust world of bad weather, a world of crop failure.

Historically, we've seen periods when on a regional scale there had been massive dust storms.

The famous Dust Bowl in the thirties in the United States, there was a consequence, partly of, Ah, very severe multiyear drought in the great Plains of the U.

S.

Combined with, at the time, add farming practices.

Whether or not that could happen at a global scale, if we're irresponsible with the climate and with our human practices, agricultural practices, industrial practices, I guess there's an open question score simply.

Matthew McConaughey's an engineer is a pilot in the world.

Now that he's told, doesn't need engineers, they need farmers, good farmers like you.

And again, there's a comment in the scene.

We didn't run out of television screens and planes.

We ran out of food.

And there is a tension between using.

Resource is in general for basic needs versus resource.

For more advanced technology.

That's already attention.

But we also know that we could grow a lot more food with a lot less water.

We could use efficient irrigation systems.

We don't have toe over pump our groundwater unsustainably, we can grow crops that are more water efficient rather than water intensive.

This is the only habitable planet we know off.

If we make it uninhabitable, we're screwed.

We can't go somewhere else.

Now he can because they have a spaceship that lets them do that.

But that's not the world we live in today.

Nelson's torching his home crop light.

They're saying it's the last harvest for okra ever.

Okay, we'll have a Sharknado.

You need sharks number one.

The next thing you have to do is you have to change the weather in southern California and then you need a tornado.

You don't see these over the ocean that often.

You need to suck the sharks up into the tornado check.

And now, to really have the drama, you need a city that you can deposit these sharks out of.

The tornado in Los Angeles happens to be conveniently located.

So you're basically saying that if we accept all of that, all of that correct?

This could be a realist realistic scream.

Great.

Can't just wait here and wait for sharks to rain down on us again.

Yes.

So this was a particularly bad storm hurricane interacting with mid latitude.

Whether what you're seeing here is the attempt of the Coast Guard who's being called in to do a Nazi rescue.

It really gives you, I think, a good sense just how difficult these operations are under these conditions, credit to the Coast Guard that they do that.

So this was not that untypical of an Atlantic hurricane.

They start to gain latitude and re curve and typically will dissipate and become part of the more mid latitude structure.

And those will be some strong winds and things like that.

But every once in a while they get trapped in sort of this own.

You call maybe more of a bear, a tropic kind of environment there, you know, and they're able to reintensify that core.

And I believe that's what happened in this case here.

So it started off as kind of any other hurricane ended up being a very unusual storm when it was a high latitude and probably more dangerous than you.

Typically, our computer weather models are pretty sophisticated, and they do a pretty good job of showing you where these dangerous areas we're going to be.

You know, if you're a seasoned Mariner working up there and you've seen these things over your lifetime when something anomalous like this comes along, You know, maybe you're not quite as willing to back off.

I think this is my livelihood.

I know how to handle myself.

Drive right through it.

Every once in a while something is going to come along and surprise you.

And I believe this was a case of that kind of happening.

I think it's an accurate depiction of the challenges faced with at sea search and rescue operations in extreme conditions.

Absolutely.

This is where they separate the men from the boys.

So here we have a finally erupting, you know, and there are volcanic bombs being treated on hitting things Well, came about Zara thing.

When having eruption, you can have the lava coming out of the volcano violently, and then, as it's traveling through the air, it cools and hardens, and they even tend to form aerodynamic shapes.

They're rolling through the air.

However, Pompeii did not have volcanic bombs.

The city was actually remarkably well preserved, the buildings and such.

So just for the archaeological evidence.

We don't believe that Vesuvius, when it erupted in 79 a.

D.

Had this type of future, but it wasn't very violent.

Eruptions in fractions of a second killed the inhabitants just from the shock and basically froze that city in time as it was buried in 80 feet of ash.

The actual incidents of volcanic bombs is not true, but an explosive eruption of Vesuvius killing all these people very violently.

Very suddenly.

That's all absolutely true and did happen about classic story Noah.

The earth is covered in storms.

They built the Ark, and now all the nonbelievers want to get on board.

But here comes the water.

There are indications in the geologic record of a massive flood that occurred in Sumerian times three or 4000 BC that resulted from a geologic event that released a big body of water that caused a huge flood in the Middle East.