Long Beach/Port of LA Tsunami?

Question

ok i'm just curious..because once I was in a marine biology class and I had a professor claim that historically (all though its probably pre-historically) a large (unknown size) tsunami hit the Port of LA/Long Beach and went all the way into what is now the city of Downey..

anyone else hear of such a thing within the geological community?

Answer 1

There was a quake in 1812 in Santa Barbara that spawned tsunami activity on about 40 miles of SoCal coastline.

But I haven't heard of any effect on Long Beach at that time.

The harbor area has been reshaped by humans over the past 200 or so years, so the same incident might cause more damage ... or none at all.

There is evidence (from a geology lecture I attended) that a mega landslide on Catalina may have caused a tsunami on the mainland, but that would have been tens of thousands of years ago and the the area looked very different because of sea level changes.