Happy Monday listeners and happy August. For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.

Let's kick off the month with a quick roundup of some of the latest news in science.

First, we have Andrea Thompson, senior news editor for sustainability at Scientific American,

to tell us about last week's earthquake and the resulting tsunami waves.

Last Tuesday, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck off the coast of Russia's Kentucky Peninsula in a subduction zone where the Pacific plate is plunging below part of the North American plate.

And subduction zones are typically where you'd see tsunamis be generated because you have a big shift in the earth that sort of provides a big push to the water.

And this area actually did produce a really big tsunami back in 1952 when there was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake.

So sort of tsunami alerts, warnings, advisories were released kind of all around the Pacific.

So there were some in Japan, some in Russia, Hawaii, all along sort of the North American coastline, you know, from the allusions down to Southern California, also in South America. And some of this is because

we generate warnings if there is the likelihood of tsunami waves arriving and there is the

possibility of them causing damage because you want to give people as much time as possible

to move away from the coast or reach higher ground. And then, and the hours after an

earthquake, we sort of get more information that helps refine, okay, how much energy was released,

how is that likely to track sort of around the basin? And that's why you'll see changes going

from maybe a warning to an advisory or something different.

Luckily, the waves were not catastrophic, but there were eight-foot waves in parts of California.

There were definitely waves in Japan and Hawaii.

Luckily, in a lot of these places, they didn't cause considerable damage, but there was structural damage.

And these kind of waves, they're not on the scale of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami,

but they're still strong enough to sweep a person off their feet or to wipe away a structure.

So a magnitude 8.8 earthquake is a really big earthquake that is up there among the strongest ever on record.

In 1952, when there was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake that caused damage as far away as Hawaii.

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