Kathryn Cunningham

Physical Geography

Laura Podratz

7 May 2020

Earthquakes and Tsunamis

I only must focus on one of those disasters, so I am going to focus on the earthquakes

because it is what sets up the rest of the events in the movie. The whole movie builds up to

where only those who can pay 1 billion euro can live because that is the emission price for living

on the arcs their making. 

Earthquakes outside of Hollywood are caused by pressure build-up in Earth’s plates and

eventually the rock ruptures. Earthquakes can happen deep inside the core or they can be shallow

quakes which tend to be more damaging since they take place so close to the crust where people

live. There are three different kinds of earthquakes, transform plate boundaries, convergent plate

boundaries, and divergent plate boundaries. Transform Plates occur when two tectonic plates

grind parallel to each other, these can be some of the deadliest because they tend to have shallow

focuses. A real-world example of a transform plate is along the San Andreas Fault. Convergent

Plate Boundaries are caused by the motion of the subducting lithosphere as it dives through the

mantle, these are found all around the Pacific Ocean basin. A real-world example of this

boundary is the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, this later generated a tsunami which we will talk about

further on. Finally, we have divergent plate boundaries, these cause “normal faulting” which is to

say it is meant to be big and destructive as it happens inland where the rock is larger, stronger,

and older. This is the kind of boundary we have in Utah. 

 In the movie, we learn that the Earth’s core is becoming unstable because of solar flares

from the Sun, as the crust becomes unstable this causes numerous problems and the one that

starts the destruction rolling is all the chain of earthquakes. It being California none of the

residents move to act they just stop and look at the crackdown their street (13 minutes in), then

we see a supermarket get ripped in half (36 minutes in) and finally, there’s the massive

earthquake that tares California to pieces (51 minutes in). We see the coast get broken up and

turn as the water comes to take it in. This has some scientific fact to it since the “mid-ocean

ridges are small and shallow because the plates are young, thin, and hot” (Dastrup). There’s an

image from the movie that helps to demonstrate that the costal crust is soft and more malleable

easily able to sink crumble and sink, but I can’t get it to load in the paper so it’s around 50

minutes into the movie. 

Earlier I said I would touch more on tsunamis, that is because yes there are earthquakes in

this movie but the biggest thing in this movie is the tsunami, in the end, it is the climax of the

movie and what everyone is working towards trying to survive. Tsunamis are the products of

earthquakes that happen in open ocean, which makes a tsunami the most devastating is when

they are shallow quakes that displace the marine floor. When an earthquake happens, it pushes

water up and down creating two types of waves, a distant tsunami that goes out to open ocean

and a local tsunami that travels towards the closest coast. I would say that the movie did a great

job of portraying the tsunami because they repeatedly show maps and simulations of the water

coming in as the Earth’s crust shifts. Then the final tsunami that picks up the arcs makes sounds

sense as everything else has shifted and the land has sunk beneath the water making it easy for

the water to flow through. The realistic execution of the tsunami was very was done well in my

opinion. Not only with the CGI of it but also with how the waves rose because of the earthquake
and broke due to hitting land. The direct effects of the disaster are obvious, it rips the world apart

and aids in the submersion of whole continents. The indirect effects are less evident because the

direct ones shine the brightest, I am not sure what the indirect consequences of an earthquake are

in this movie. The only thing I think the government could have done differently was how they

built the arcs, when the high importance personnel get on we hear Adrian Helmsley say “you can

fit ten people in this room” after walking into his smallish room. But he has a point, the point

was to save lives so it would be better to try to cram people into rooms in the motion to save

lives. Especially since they only spent about two to three months total on the arcs, they could not

know that at the time of construction, but they could have also tried to make more room for

people, especially the workers. The long-term impacts are hard to miss, the world is not at all

like it was with only Africa and a bit of middle Asia still above sea level, and with the poles

shifted it has made them the center of the globe. In the end, they said some of the water was

receding faster than they anticipated so it is possible the rest of the continents would reemerge,

but they will never be the same since the earthquakes changed so much. 

 
Dastrup, Adam. “Physical Geography: Earthquake Zones.” Lumen,
courses.lumenlearning.com/geophysical/chapter/earthquake-zones/.

USGS. “Life of a Tsunami.” USGS Science for a Changing World,

www.usgs.gov/centers/pcmsc/science/life-a-tsunami?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-
science_center_objects.

“What Is It about an Earthquake That Causes a Tsunami?” USGS Science for a Changing World,
www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-it-about-earthquake-causes-a-tsunami?qt-
news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products.