What was that? Tsunami buoy bounces 180 feet!
UPDATE: The NDBC has stated to a news organization that the buoy was undergoing maintenance, which they failed to announce on their Facebook Page like they had done with the last few buoys undergoing repairs.
An anomalous reading from the Station 44402 - Southeast Block Canyon DART Tsunami Buoy off the coast of New England has social media buzzing this morning.
The buoy went into "Event Mode" (meaning that it had detected a large amount of vertical movement) around 2238 Z time (6:38 p.m. ET) Saturday and bounced around for 23 minutes. Here's what the data looks like:
The buoy suddenly fell 17 m (51 feet) then bounced around, slowly recovering. At 2248 Z, it fell 60 m (180 feet) then slowly recovered again.
Was this a tsunami? Almost assuredly not. It bears no resemblance to an actual tsunami event, for example the one off the coast of Ecuador earlier this month (April 17). Here's what that looked like:
That entire event only lasted about four minutes and was about half a meter (1.7 feet) at its highest change. Tsunamis are small until they hit the coast, then they magnify exponentially. A tsunami that generates a 180-foot change is not possible, and if it were, it would wipe out most of the Earth and I wouldn't be writing this.
Also note that the ups and downs in the Ecuador graph are a general wave form, but they are somewhat random, as nature is. The points outlined in pink on Saturday's graph above are very suspicious from a data perspective, because the change is so similar. You wouldn't see this with a tsunami wave, and the only place I've ever seen it before is on a thermometer where the instrument attempted to self-correct to the real value without jumping quickly.
The anomaly wasn't picked up by other tsunami buoys -- if it was a tsunami it would be, because the waves are large and expand worldwide (example).
There are other theories out there -- among the science-based is a claim that a meteorite hit near the buoy. This purportedly comes from NASA, but I can't find any evidence of NASA saying this. The odds of a meteorite hitting close to one of two tsunami buoys off the U.S. east coast is astronomically unlikely (pun intended). A whale or submarine surfacing is another possibility, but these buoys measure the movement of the whole ocean, not just the surface, so I'm not even sure that a splash nearby could set them off.
From time to time, the NDBC does maintenance on the buoys to fix problems; this is a definite possibility, though they have not announced any service windows on their Facebook Page or website. If it wasn't maintenance, it was probably just bad data. I've asked the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) on Facebook for comment, but they have not replied yet. If they do, I'll update the top of this blog.
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