Comment by pineaux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pineaux | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering if "earthquake lights" might have something to do with this myth.

Those strange lights that are seen in the sky with strong earthquakes. Believed to be caused by huge electro mechanical forces of large earthquakes.

I was wondering what a Thunderbird had to do with an earthquake and suddenly remembered an earlier post here on HN.

Sound like a plausible explanation to me:

1) there is an unrelated famine.

2) suddenly eerie lighting like flashes are seen in the air above the sea. 3) followed by earthquake tremors. 4) followed by a tsunami. Many canoes are destroyed. A landslide buried a forrest. 5) the tsunami throws whale(s) onto the beach. Solving the famine by delivering a large amount of whale meat.

6) unrelated, the rains come and the animal and agriculture can thrive again.

7) the aforementioned steps are linked together in a logical coherent (be it a fantastical) story.

Or: It has nothing to do with real life events and was just thought-up by a creative storyteller.

>Thus one narrative tells of the Thunderbird pitted against its prey, the whale which kept trying to elude capture, and this escalated to such turmoil that it uprooted trees, and no tree ever grew back again in the area

At least to me that last entry points even more towards an earthquake origin of the story.

http://www.tectonics.caltech.edu/outreach/highlights/sumatra...

Both subsidence and raising of elevations can happen during earthquakes. We commonly see these in coral deaths as the article above, or in tree deaths when land subsides under water.

It's possible, but if that's the case then it wasn't the earthquake which this story has been linked to, since that earthquake was in Japan.

No - the earthquake was strong enough to send a tsunami to Japan. Its epicentre was on the west coast: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1700_Cascadia_earthquake

Oops! You're quite right of course. I remembered Japan because that's where we had the written records of the event.

Doesn’t it seem like an earthquake of that magnitude would have corresponding lore from natives basically among the entire western region of North America? Why only the PNW tribes?

1. There might be, just with those accounts not having been encountered due to the relative sizes of the groups involved.

2. Take a look at the map of where the epicenter is estimated to be and it’s fairly clear how the kink point in the California coastline where it switches from running N-S to NW-SE would “catch” (probably not the correct term) the tsunami with land and prevent it from going further.

3. An examination of the topography of the areas near the Pacific coast in what’s now SW Oregon and NW California shows why few Native groups would have chosen to live there in 1700 and why a tsunami would be less likely to leave an impact big enough to be remembered: it’s mountainous and inhospitable, with the elevation rising rapidly and the population low to this day. A unexpected middle of the night quake (estimated to have been around 9pm local plus the hours for the water to travel) washing away a couple fishing boats while everyone in a tiny tribe was asleep would be a small misfortune, not enough to make up legends about fighting gods over.

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