SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 19 (UPI) — Supertyphoon Haiyan set a world record when it touched down in the Philippines by moving a 177-ton boulder a distance of about 150 feet.
Max Engel, a geoscientist at the University of Cologne in Germany, and colleagues from his college and the University of the Philippines’ Marine Science Institute said they looked at satellite photos from before and after the typhoon’s landfall in the Philippines in November 2013 and determined the boulder, weighing more than 25 adult African elephants, had been moved about 150 feet along a beach by the Haiyan’s tsunami-like waves.
The researchers, who presented their paper, “Storm Surge of Supertyphoon Haiyan (7–9 Nov 2013) on Samar (Philippines) Moved the Largest Boulder Ever Documented for a Recent Storm,” Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco, said the boulder is the largest on record to be shifted by a storm.
Engel and his colleagues said their findings suggest other boulder movements associated with tsunamis may have been caused by superstorms.
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