A mystery surrounding one of the most destructive tsunamis of the 20th Century just got more puzzling as a seafloor search failed to reveal the smoking gun scientists expected to find.
On April Fools Day in 1946 an earthquake off the coast of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska spawned a series of waves known as a tsunami. One wave as high as a 13-story building hit locally. Others raced across the Pacific, killing dozens and leaving a trail of destruction that stretched to California and even South America.
The earthquake was too small to spawn the huge local wave, many scientists agree, and they have struggled for decades to figure out what happened. The leading theory has been that the earthquake triggered an underwater landslide, generating a one-two punch.
But a seafloor-mapping project by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, designed specifically to look for the cause of the tsunami, didn't find evidence to support that theory.
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