Scientists Fact Check Natural Disasters In Movies | Vanity Fair

[Music] at the very least maybe the tsunami will put off some of the fires there is that silver lining [Music] hi I'm Morgan page and I'm a geophysicist with the US Geological Survey in Pasadena California my name is Mike Ango I'm the tzunami program manager for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration I'm Peter Glick a hydrologist and climatologist from the Pacific Institute in Oakland California today we're going to be reviewing some of Hollywood's biggest disaster films and commenting on how realistic they are this is toward the end of the movie and the rock recognizes boats are tilting in a way that suggests that the water is receding pull around like that he's right to be thinking about that we've just had this strong shaking tsunamis do tend to be associated with that type of shaking when you involve water but here's where it starts to come off the rails what they're depicting here is a giant tsunami generated somewhere out in the Pacific and there it is right there yeah I don't think the world has seen this large of a tsunami wave you would need a major oceanic subduction zone type of an event to generate that type of a wave that mechanism does not exist in this portion of the Pacific maybe we get some fracturing the extension of the San Andreas out there but it would all be very kind of small just in first order because of San Andreas the land is moving horizontally it is a bit harder to get tsunamis you need either vertical motion of a fault to get a tsunami or you need something where say the shaking causes an underwater landslide and so that gives you the movement of the ground under the bay but you need something a little different than you would have in say a subduction zone earth this one the way it's depicted you can safely scratch off the list but there is a long history of these movies taking out the Golden Gate Bridge well that's true figure out a way if that was on your checklist take out Golden Gate Bridge this is probably the best way to do it I'm with you on that Peter so when the earthquake hits the house amanda peet and her family they actually do the right thing in this scene initially they drop cover and hold on they get under a stable piece of furniture which is offering them protection from all the falling objects but then john cusack arrives and tells them to get out of there now their house collapses shortly after so I guess it was the right call given that that happened but in reality a wood frame house like this is one of the safest places to be in an earthquake the scale of what we're seeing is grossly exaggerated in this clip the huge fall scriptures popping up all over the place how they're trying to outrun the seismic waves in their car which is impossible because they're too fast an earthquake occurs when a fault that's been under tremendous stress suddenly begins to slip one side of the fault moving relative to the other side and that causes a generation of seismic waves we could get P waves or the first thing we feel followed by S waves and followed by a surface waves and if you're far from an earthquake a surface wave which is a rolling kind of motion it's typically the main thing that you feel so you do have the rolling motion of the earth but we're talking about centimeters not meters you know we're talking much smaller scales of destruction than what we're seeing in this movie this seems pretty unrealistic I mean the one thing I liked about it that they the family originally did the right thing we've been completely undone when they just had this over the top ground motions that destroyed what would have been probably a pretty safe place to be in the earthquake so we're in Antarctica scientists are drilling ice cores which is something that we do there is a tremendous amount of information you can get from ancient ice cores in Antarctic about climate about weather about atmospheric conditions and then like a good crazy scientist who's been spending his life collecting data he jumps across the crevasse to try and save some of the ice cores the day after tomorrow is in some ways the best of the really crazy disaster movies we do see ice shelves breaking off in Antarctica enormous ice shelves the size of the states and part as a result of human-caused climate change and as temperatures go up we're beginning to see fracturing of those shelves sitting mostly on water at the moment and that may accelerate the movement of land ice into the oceans and that's what raises sea level the speed we see here is not realistic what's happening here is a very fast crevasse forming and the ice shelf moving quickly it's typically a little bit slower than that but that's what we're seeing here what's happening in the movie volcano it's so hot hid the rubber on his sneakers is melting he's struggling to move as he carries an injured person off of the subway car wow there's like lava just flowing down from somewhere windows are breaking oh and there's just you know there's just lava everywhere flames it's really far and he's got this guy on his back oh he jumps as far as he can as far as I know about the interaction between human body and lava that seems realistic if you're in a situation where there's a slow-moving lava flow you can get fairly close and it's not going to immediately kill you it is realistic of stepping into lava would kill you so as far as I know it seems he's possible using concrete barriers to stop a lava flow and using water to stop a lava flow both of these things have been done in the real world you can sometimes use concrete barriers to divert the lava that's a little bit easier than um just stopping it cuz it's gonna keep coming but it's been done in Hawaii and in Italy so in the movie it's depicted that there is a volcano right under Los Angeles and just to be clear there is not a volcano right under Los Angeles um there are places in the world where you do get volcanoes but Los Angeles is not one of those places here in LA it's one of several possibilities it's an iconic scene cow flying by McKenna doesn't look all that perturb they're wondering about the same cow or different cow probably the scene that everyone remembers from this movie there is a lot of things that get you know sucked up into these and distributed around so including including livestock the one quibble I have with this scene is that when I first see the cow it go is going one way and then the cow next time I see it is going the other way that would make sense if they're driving right through the tornado I guess but it looks like the tornado is off to the side so I mean tornadoes are just gonna suddenly switch direction that would not be realistic but overall you know livestock we think that's reasonable no in the National Weather Service you know contributed to some technical advice and ideas to the filmmakers and I think a lot of what's shown here shows that natural evolution and trying to better understand these systems one of the fundamental characteristics of almost all of these disaster movies is that they try to build on things that could be plausible but to a more extreme sense and so the movie starts with a series of clips from real extreme events flooding tornadoes drying out of reservoirs the worry of course is that we are now modifying the climate in a way that will make these more extreme events even more damaging to civilization and now it's transitioning into massive CGI storms heatwave and Madrid that kills millions of people and the global response the world is coming together and producing what in the business we call geoengineering Engineering options for mitigating the consequences of human influence on the climate and they're launching satellites most of the geoengineering that we're talking about now is really just talk there are ideas of things that we can do one could argue that a massive tree planting campaign or building sea walls is small-scale geoengineering but the scale of the geoengineering described in Geo Storm the planetary satellite systems that's not our near future in the movie The Corrs we're just flying right into monuments oh oh they're crashing into windows oh now it's all Hitchcockian everyone's fleeing so that one of the premises of the movie the core is that the outer core of the earth has stopped spinning so therefore there's no longer any magnetic field so if there's no magnetic field on earth a compass wouldn't work and birds use the magnetic field to migrate so they use it to find the direction when they're migrating the problem with this clip is that the birds would still be able to see even without a magnetic field I shouldn't just be flying into buildings and statues for no reason Edwards navigate I say no no no the long-range stuff here's a world where something has gone horribly wrong and it's a world of dust a world of bad weather a world of crop failure historically we've seen periods when on a regional scale there have been massive dust storms the famous Dust Bowl in the 30s in the United States there was a consequence partly of a very severe multi-year drought in the great plains of the US combined with at the time bad farming practices whether or not that could happen at a global scale if we're irresponsible with the climate and with our human practices agricultural practices industrial practices I guess there's an open question Tom's score simply isn't high enough Matthew McConaughey's an engineer is a pilot in a world now that he's told doesn't need engineers they need farmers good farmers like you and again there's a comment in the scene we didn't run out of television screens and planes we ran out of food and there is a tension between using resources in general for basic needs versus resources for more advanced technology that's already attention but we also know that we could grow a lot more food with a lot less water we could use efficient irrigation systems we don't have to over pump our groundwater unsustainably we can grow crops that are more water efficient rather than water intensive this is the only habitable planet we know of if we make it uninhabitable we're screwed we can't go somewhere else now he can because they have a spaceship that lets them do that but that's not the world we live in today Nelson's Torchy's whole crop light they're saying it's the last harvest for okra ever okay well to have a sharknado you need sharks number one the next thing you have to do is you have to change the weather in Southern California and then you need a tornado you don't see these over the ocean that often you need to suck the sharks up into the tornado check and now to really have the drama you need a city that you can deposit these sharks out of the tornado in Los Angeles happens to be a conveniently located so you're basically saying that if we they accept all of that all of that correct this could be a realistic realistic of the ones five quoting reverb scream great can't just wait here and wait for sharks to rain down on us again yeah so this was a particularly bad storm hurricane and interacting with mid-latitude weather what you're seeing here is the attempt of the Coast Guard who's being called in to do an at-sea rescue it really gives you I think a good sense just how difficult these operations are under these conditions credit to the Coast Guard that they do that so this was you know not that untypical of an Atlantic hurricane they start to gain latitude and recurve and typically will dissipate and become part of the more mid-latitude structure and those will be some strong winds and things like that but every once in a while they get trapped in sort of this own what you call maybe more of a barrel that kind of environment there you know and they're able to really that's what happened in this case here so it started off as kind of any other hurricane ended up being a very unusual storm when it was at high latitude and probably more dangerous than you typically see our computer weather models are pretty sophisticated they do a pretty good job of showing you where these dangerous areas are going to be you know if you're a seasoned Mariner you know working up there and you've seen these things over your lifetime when something anomalous like this comes along you know maybe you're not quite as willing to back off and I've done this this is my livelihood I know how to handle myself drive right through it every once in a while something's going to come along and surprise you and I believe this was a case of that kind of happening I think it's an accurate depiction of the challenges faced with at sea search and rescue operations and extreme conditions absolutely this is where they separate the men from the boys so here we have a violently erupting volcano and there are volcanic bombs being extruded and hitting things volcano bombs are a thing when have an eruption you can have the lava coming out of the volcano violently and then as it's traveling through the air it cools and hardens and they even tend to form aerodynamic shapes because they're curling through the air however Pompeii did not have volcanic bombs the city was actually remarkably well preserved the buildings and such so just in the archaeological evidence we don't believe that Mount Vesuvius when it erupted in 79 AD had this type of feature but it was a very violent eruption in fractions of a second killed the inhabitants just from the shoe shine and basically froze that city in time as it was buried in 80 feet of ash the actual incidence of volcanic bombs is not true but an explosive eruption at Vesuvius killing all these people very violently very suddenly that's all absolutely true and did happen service the classic story Noah the earth is covered in storms they built the ark and now all the non-believers want to get on board but here comes the water there are indications in the geologic record of a massive flood that occurred in Sumerian times three or four thousand BC that resulted from a geologic event that released a big body of water that caused the huge flood in the Middle East not a global flood but a massive flood that probably was then passed down through word of mouth through the legends and the myths of the people who live there he wouldn't get those bursts of water from the ground but extreme rain and flooding is common we live on a water planet 97% of the world's waters in the oceans and there's water in our rivers and lakes and there's water in the atmosphere and it's cycles we get evaporation formation of clouds condensations rain and snow back to the oceans runoff to the oceans there is a lot of land ice in Antarctica and Greenland but not enough to cover the surface of the earth if all of the land ice melted fall of the water were in the oceans it would raise sea level very substantially but even there only 100 feet at most and so land above that level would still be out of the oceans without divine intervention there's not enough water to completely cover the earth the storm cannot be stopped but it can be survived this is based on real events this is Thailand and about 500 kilometers away we've had a magnitude 9 earthquake happen and has unleashed a tsunami in all directions I think the scene is brilliant for a number of reasons number one you should see the animals all of our I witness reports of tsunamis impacting usually involve the animals recognizing that something's not right is this war wave this leading wave of the tsunami approaches of coastline it makes noise sort of loud and I think they did a nice job showing that the next thing is that you see or the palm trees go down and that really is the first indication that there is something bad is happening your natural warning signs are your best indicators of a tsunami we feel strong shaking and it lasts for some duration go to high ground this has generated 500 kilometers away they wouldn't have felt any shaking there's almost nothing they could do so here comes the water but what it's doing is it's taking out mostly the ground floor so if you had had been conditioned enough to be able to get up one or better two floors most of that water you know is going to get below you you know that would have been a good evacuation after this event we now under the UN have a comprehensive international forecast and warning system and this type of tsunami will likely not happen again in this way because of the advanced warnings now again it but it was too late for them we had to learn the lesson unfortunately not only is that clip exceptionally realistic if someone were to ask me what's it like to go through a tsunami I think I would refer them to this movie it's that detailed and that accurate so we're gonna Park in New York City it appears ordinary-looking breeze but in fact it's a very menacing breeze because that's what's carrying some sort of toxin or chemical that is being emitted by plants to turn humans into suicidal zombies police officer has just shot himself another zombie person is getting out of the car walking over to the gun though don't do it basically having their revenge on the human race for probably good reason and decided to make us off ourselves there plenty of plants that have all sorts of psychotropic and properties that's some people may know from direct experience and there were plants that will hurt you if you eat them or touch them I think the closest thing to this is there is a fungus that will cause ants to climb to the top of blades of grass that makes the ant in a way suicidal at least this amplifies the ANA it climbs the top of the blade grounds everywhere so that's like the closest thing I'm trying really hard to find something related as plausible now that's all I got clearly this is complete nonsense but you know the earth is resilient and even if humans don't make it for whatever reason plants likely will what this is one of many movies with dam failures water is a powerful thing and I guess we have a bank robbery going on here there's Morgan Freeman things are erupting everywhere there goes the ban as part of our water system we build big dams we've learned over the last hundred years how to build really big dams and sometimes they fail and when they fail really bad things happen so the way dam failures typically work is there's a weak spot either in the dam itself that's overwhelmed by a massive flood upstream or there's something with the geologic formation that the dam is built in or if the dam was built to the wrong standards and once you have a little failure you get a big failure because the power of water is so overwhelming it punches through any weakness and I think this is probably not an unrealistic depiction of a big dam failure exactly we have very active super cell type of tornados here through three it Drive really a big fire now and a big fire firenado there are plenty of people who run around trying to film these disasters or have tram yeah that would turn that there would be no mistake yeah there it goes tornadoes come from what are called supercell thunderstorms what happens there's a lot of up and a lot of dam that's associated with that thunderstorm the air is coming down that air spreads out of the surface and sometimes due to friction and other forces you'll start to see it rotate every once in a while that rotation gets literally sucked up into the supercell which is also rotating in the same direction and when that happens we have seen fire tornadoes associated primarily with wildfires where you get significant temperature differences you have a fire you have a lot of convective activity fire tornadoes are a thing flying debris is the big problem with tornadoes so most would want to have some sort of underground shelter where you're shielded from that if you can't you want to find an interior room that isn't going to be susceptible to things flying in windows the idea that you can have multiple torn attic outbreaks and I think if you were happy to hit something on fire like that it would suck the fire so I would say this is not a completely unreasonable depiction of a severe severe tornado out one of the themes of all of these disaster movies which some of us love to watch is whether or not humans will survive how we'll survive what the threats are the challenge our ability to survive and we're not worried about all life on the planet going extinct because of these kinds of things we're worried about humans and whether or not we're gonna be smart enough to foresee and prevent the disasters that either were responsible for or that we might see coming as a species just don't have it within our capacity to look forward enough to get in front of these problems we're very good at dealing and we have no other choice I'm gonna try to quote Winston Churchill here and you can really count on the Americans to do the right thing once they've exhausted every other alternative I have a sense that when push comes to shove and we really have to step up and make a difference we may just figure it out for some of these things it's time to step up now [Music]

Channel: Vanity Fair

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Keywords: vanity fair reviews, scientists review, scientists review scenes, scene review, disaster scenes, natural disaster movies, reviewing movie scenes, science in film, science in movies, accurate science movies, twister, the day after tomorrow, expert reviews, storm chasing movies, craziest disaster scenes, best disaster movies, scientists react, experts react, react to disaster movies, disaster movies, scientists explain, experts explain, crazy disaster scenes, vanity fair

Id: Oz42l-KZgJo

Length: 22min 42sec (1362 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/addiesmom2012]

A friend of mine has a disaster movie podcast and they do science fact checking, but every time I listen I want to do a government/EM fact check as well. My agency actually uses the movie Volcano in our EOC training as a kind of Where's Waldo of EM inaccuracies.