**The Survival Capsule: A High-Tech Option for Tsunami Survivors**

Imagine being caught off guard by a massive tsunami, with no escape in sight. For those living in coastal areas, the thought of being trapped in the middle of the ocean can be daunting. But what if there was a way to protect yourself and your loved ones from the devastating impact of a tsunami? Enter the survival capsule, a brainchild of engineer Julianne Sharp, designed to withstand even the most powerful of tsunamis.

Sharp's idea was born on a family vacation at the beach in 2010, when he started thinking about how to survive something as powerful as an Indonesian tsunami. The answer was simple: an escape pod designed to aerospace standards that could survive a tsunami and all the debris and sharp impacts that come with it. Consisting of a tubular aluminum frame over which two aluminum hemispheres are welded together, this vessel is designed to absorb impacts from the outside while providing a safe haven inside.

The survival capsule's interior features Lexan glass, a super-high strength material that has thermal resilience similar to that used on the space shuttle to prevent overheating during re-entry. Sharp's team put the capsule through its ultimate drop test by sending it off the top of Palouse Falls in Washington, a massive 200-foot drop. While not exactly facing 200-foot waves in a tsunami, this controlled test helped determine whether his creation could survive those extreme forces.

**Testing the Survival Capsule**

To see just how much the survival capsule could handle, Sharp's team conducted a real-life test in the harbor of Seattle. The team lowered the capsule into the water while one crew member remained on the shore, and another sat on a boat doing doughnuts around them. As they watched from a safe distance, the survival capsule bounced and swayed in the waves, but miraculously remained intact.

Inside the capsule, the test subject (who will remain anonymous) was thrown around like a rag doll, but seemed to be holding up surprisingly well. "I started to get a real sense of what it might be like to be at the mercy of the ocean," they admitted. "I think I'm okay." The experience left them shaken but alive, and provided valuable insight into the capsule's performance.

**Safety Features and Cost**

While the survival capsule may not be the solution for everyone, its creators emphasize that it could be a life-saving option for people in remote areas who cannot get to an evacuation point or those who might not have time. To mitigate the risk of being lost at sea, Sharp recommends installing a GPS system on the vessel so that help can be sent if needed. Additionally, the capsule can be tethered to a point on shore, allowing it to be pulled back in if all else fails.

So how much will this advanced survival capsule set you back? At $15,000, it's an investment that may seem steep for some, but Sharp argues that it could be worth every penny. "Being inside here felt a lot safer than being in the middle of the ocean without any protection," they noted. "It probably won't feel like a Disneyland ride when a world-shaking tsunami eventually does hit, but with a bit of advanced engineering we might just have a solution to get us out alive."

**The Future of Tsunami Survival**

While the survival capsule is still in its prototype phase and has yet to be tested in real-world conditions, Sharp's vision for its future is clear. He envisions a system that can provide protection not just for humans, but also for pets and other vulnerable individuals who may not have access to evacuation routes. As technology continues to advance, it will be fascinating to see how the survival capsule evolves – and whether it becomes an essential tool in the fight against tsunamis.

**Additional Considerations**

One question that has been bugging Sharp's team is: what if you get caught in a tsunami and there's no way to open the door? In such cases, they recommend pulling out the pins on the emergency release mechanism, which allows you to scramble out of the capsule. This simple but effective solution can be a lifesaver in a desperate situation.

For those who might not have access to a survival capsule, Sharp emphasizes the importance of being prepared for natural disasters. "You never know when disaster will strike," they caution. "Being able to take action quickly and make smart decisions is crucial."

In conclusion, while the survival capsule may seem like science fiction, it's an innovative solution that could provide hope for those living in tsunami-prone areas. With its advanced technology and safety features, this vessel has the potential to be a game-changer in the fight against tsunamis. As Sharp says, "Being inside here felt a lot safer than being in the middle of the ocean without any protection."

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enall right I'm kidding I'm feeling safe and secure in my jump safe so I reckon I'm just about ready mega tsunami happens it's going to impact all the coasts of the Atlantic from Brazil to Nova Scotia to England and to Morocco you on the day after Christmas in 2004 just before 8 o'clock in the morning an earthquake shook the ocean floor off the coast of Indonesia with the strength of 23,000 nagasaki bombs the force lifted the floor several meters setting off a massive tsunami that would kill close to a quarter of a million people less than seven years later another magnitude 9 earthquake this one struck off the coast of Japan and caused a tsunami that killed 18,000 people and led to the meltdown of the Fukushima reactor we won't be able to stop the next tsunami but could technology help us survive I've traveled to the outskirts of Santa Cruz a few miles from the San Andreas Fault to meet with Stephen Ward he knows about as much as you can know about tsunamis he spent his research career studying tsunamis and simulating them pixel by pixel on his computer screen after a few minutes with Ward one thing was clear when a massive earthquake hits you do not want to be near the water typical wave of the beach might goes 10 miles an hour 15 miles an hour a tsunami wave in the middle of the ocean goes 500 miles an hour Peter the jet we all know that earthquakes are caused by the movement of the Earth's tectonic plates the quakes that cause tsunamis are called subduction earthquakes when one plate slides under another and displaces everything above it those subduction zones are near places like the Pacific Northwest Alaska Japan and Indonesia when those plates shift the water above it moves too and that's when a tsunami causes real devastation I always like to imagine like a giant out in the ocean he grabs the seafloor and lift the seafloor up and holds it there and all the waters it slides in for 10 or 15 minutes and then giant let's go and all it slides back out again so all of that motion in and out is going to drag people and carry them out to sea the key to survival is getting early warning that an earthquake has hit and that a tsunami could be coming by tracking seismic waves seismologist can analyze the earthquakes magnitude and motion to see if it's likely to cause a tsunami they say if it's if it's long and strong be gone so if you start shaking at a minute it stops you got about 10 minutes to boom follow the signs and get up you know I can't make a cup of tea in less than 10 minutes I need way more time than that luckily scientists like Ward can use computer simulations to predict when and how tsunamis will hit but I have bad news for you earthquakes aren't the only thing that can cause tsunamis if you have giant collapse of a volcano you can make a tsunami 500 feet a thousand feet height let's talk mega tsunamis Ward says there have been dozens of huge landslides off the Hawaiian coast over the last 20 million years big enough to trigger a mega tsunami these are 500 cubic miles it's like this economy of Santa Cruz falling into the ocean and you can imagine if such a thing happens it's going to push water thousands of feet high but what causes the worst mega tsunamis asteroids communit fifty miles per second and they can be as big as a house or because a couple acres in rows and they're gonna blow a hole in the ocean all the way to the seafloor and 50 miles wide if mega tsunami happens it's going to impact all the coast of the Atlantic from Brazil to Nova Scotia to England and to Morocco so what do you do when a tsunami hits and there's no escape well I had it out to Seattle's Puget Sound to test one high-tech option that might just be crazy enough to work I had no idea what I was signing up for meet the survival capsule it might look like something from a spy movie but it's actually meant to protect you your family and even your pets from the impacts of a tsunami it's the brainchild of julianne sharp an engineer with almost 30 years of experience in the aerospace industry back in 2010 he was on a family vacation at the beach when he started to think about the Indonesian tsunami that got sharp thinking about how to survive something that powerful and the answer was an escape pod designed to aerospace standards that could survive a tsunami and all the debris and sharp impacts that come with it consists of a tubular aluminum frame over which we bring two aluminum hemispheres and weld it all together we have lexan glass which is super high strength and has thermal resilience that frame it's designed to help the pod absorb impacts from the outside and there's a silver lining on the inside the same thermal material that was used on the space shuttle to prevent it overheating during reentry to see just how much it can handle sharpen his team put the capsule through the ultimate drop test sending it off the top of the Palouse Falls in Washington a massive 200-foot drop while you might not face 200 foot waves in a tsunami sharp wanted to find out whether his creation could survive those extreme forces but waterfall or no waterfall a controlled test is very different to a real-life tsunami there's no crew in a safety boat to reel you in if you get caught in a natural disaster which leads me to the question that has been bugging me all morning how does someone find me again am I just stuck bobbing out in the ocean for the rest of my life we we recommend you install a GPS system so if she was to go out to sea The Beacon would go off and everybody know where she was the capsule can also be tethered to a point on shore so you can be pulled in and if all else fails and there's no Coast Guard to rescue you or no one to reel you in there's one other option if you have to if you can't open the door you can pull the pins and the drawer got all drop-down you can scramble that it's very very simple it doesn't require any high technology and I guess the last question how much of these going to one of these going to cost me well right now if you order one for me this one will cost $15,000 to build all right well I think all that's left for me to do is to try it out yeah very good I've got my walkie-talkie I've got my fellow passenger which is a bag of ballast I'm in my jump seat nice and secure I feel like I'm ready to face a tsunami let's see how I go as they lowered the capsule into the water I started to have massive second thoughts about volunteering for this I'd had nightmares about being left in the middle of the ocean and even though I've taken enough seasickness medication to knock out an elephant I wasn't sure if I was going to survive the waves but we just had to put it to the test bring it on over and while I sat inside my own personal nightmare the rest of our crew sat on a boat doing doughnuts around me in the harbor Wow Oh Wow now don't get me wrong these waves aren't anything like what I'd expect in a real tsunami but still I was getting knocked around a lot inside that little orange wall I started to get a real sense of what it might be like to be at the mercy of the ocean I think I'm okay I made it the survival capsule team has built this two-person prototype which they say is close to going into production and Sharpe says it could be a life-saving option for people in remote areas people who can't get to an evacuation point or those who might not have the time and sure I didn't experience the real deal surviving a magnitude 9 earthquake packing up all my supplies and getting to my capsule in less than 10 minutes not to mention the full size waves that come with a tsunami a fifteen thousand dollar tsunami escape capsule might not be the solution for everyone but still being inside here felt a lot safer than being in the middle of the ocean without any protection when a world-shaking tsunami eventually does hit it probably won't feel like a Disneyland ride but with a bit of advanced engineering we might just have a solution to get us out alive I'm ready for so much more you can give me all your gun over you youall right I'm kidding I'm feeling safe and secure in my jump safe so I reckon I'm just about ready mega tsunami happens it's going to impact all the coasts of the Atlantic from Brazil to Nova Scotia to England and to Morocco you on the day after Christmas in 2004 just before 8 o'clock in the morning an earthquake shook the ocean floor off the coast of Indonesia with the strength of 23,000 nagasaki bombs the force lifted the floor several meters setting off a massive tsunami that would kill close to a quarter of a million people less than seven years later another magnitude 9 earthquake this one struck off the coast of Japan and caused a tsunami that killed 18,000 people and led to the meltdown of the Fukushima reactor we won't be able to stop the next tsunami but could technology help us survive I've traveled to the outskirts of Santa Cruz a few miles from the San Andreas Fault to meet with Stephen Ward he knows about as much as you can know about tsunamis he spent his research career studying tsunamis and simulating them pixel by pixel on his computer screen after a few minutes with Ward one thing was clear when a massive earthquake hits you do not want to be near the water typical wave of the beach might goes 10 miles an hour 15 miles an hour a tsunami wave in the middle of the ocean goes 500 miles an hour Peter the jet we all know that earthquakes are caused by the movement of the Earth's tectonic plates the quakes that cause tsunamis are called subduction earthquakes when one plate slides under another and displaces everything above it those subduction zones are near places like the Pacific Northwest Alaska Japan and Indonesia when those plates shift the water above it moves too and that's when a tsunami causes real devastation I always like to imagine like a giant out in the ocean he grabs the seafloor and lift the seafloor up and holds it there and all the waters it slides in for 10 or 15 minutes and then giant let's go and all it slides back out again so all of that motion in and out is going to drag people and carry them out to sea the key to survival is getting early warning that an earthquake has hit and that a tsunami could be coming by tracking seismic waves seismologist can analyze the earthquakes magnitude and motion to see if it's likely to cause a tsunami they say if it's if it's long and strong be gone so if you start shaking at a minute it stops you got about 10 minutes to boom follow the signs and get up you know I can't make a cup of tea in less than 10 minutes I need way more time than that luckily scientists like Ward can use computer simulations to predict when and how tsunamis will hit but I have bad news for you earthquakes aren't the only thing that can cause tsunamis if you have giant collapse of a volcano you can make a tsunami 500 feet a thousand feet height let's talk mega tsunamis Ward says there have been dozens of huge landslides off the Hawaiian coast over the last 20 million years big enough to trigger a mega tsunami these are 500 cubic miles it's like this economy of Santa Cruz falling into the ocean and you can imagine if such a thing happens it's going to push water thousands of feet high but what causes the worst mega tsunamis asteroids communit fifty miles per second and they can be as big as a house or because a couple acres in rows and they're gonna blow a hole in the ocean all the way to the seafloor and 50 miles wide if mega tsunami happens it's going to impact all the coast of the Atlantic from Brazil to Nova Scotia to England and to Morocco so what do you do when a tsunami hits and there's no escape well I had it out to Seattle's Puget Sound to test one high-tech option that might just be crazy enough to work I had no idea what I was signing up for meet the survival capsule it might look like something from a spy movie but it's actually meant to protect you your family and even your pets from the impacts of a tsunami it's the brainchild of julianne sharp an engineer with almost 30 years of experience in the aerospace industry back in 2010 he was on a family vacation at the beach when he started to think about the Indonesian tsunami that got sharp thinking about how to survive something that powerful and the answer was an escape pod designed to aerospace standards that could survive a tsunami and all the debris and sharp impacts that come with it consists of a tubular aluminum frame over which we bring two aluminum hemispheres and weld it all together we have lexan glass which is super high strength and has thermal resilience that frame it's designed to help the pod absorb impacts from the outside and there's a silver lining on the inside the same thermal material that was used on the space shuttle to prevent it overheating during reentry to see just how much it can handle sharpen his team put the capsule through the ultimate drop test sending it off the top of the Palouse Falls in Washington a massive 200-foot drop while you might not face 200 foot waves in a tsunami sharp wanted to find out whether his creation could survive those extreme forces but waterfall or no waterfall a controlled test is very different to a real-life tsunami there's no crew in a safety boat to reel you in if you get caught in a natural disaster which leads me to the question that has been bugging me all morning how does someone find me again am I just stuck bobbing out in the ocean for the rest of my life we we recommend you install a GPS system so if she was to go out to sea The Beacon would go off and everybody know where she was the capsule can also be tethered to a point on shore so you can be pulled in and if all else fails and there's no Coast Guard to rescue you or no one to reel you in there's one other option if you have to if you can't open the door you can pull the pins and the drawer got all drop-down you can scramble that it's very very simple it doesn't require any high technology and I guess the last question how much of these going to one of these going to cost me well right now if you order one for me this one will cost $15,000 to build all right well I think all that's left for me to do is to try it out yeah very good I've got my walkie-talkie I've got my fellow passenger which is a bag of ballast I'm in my jump seat nice and secure I feel like I'm ready to face a tsunami let's see how I go as they lowered the capsule into the water I started to have massive second thoughts about volunteering for this I'd had nightmares about being left in the middle of the ocean and even though I've taken enough seasickness medication to knock out an elephant I wasn't sure if I was going to survive the waves but we just had to put it to the test bring it on over and while I sat inside my own personal nightmare the rest of our crew sat on a boat doing doughnuts around me in the harbor Wow Oh Wow now don't get me wrong these waves aren't anything like what I'd expect in a real tsunami but still I was getting knocked around a lot inside that little orange wall I started to get a real sense of what it might be like to be at the mercy of the ocean I think I'm okay I made it the survival capsule team has built this two-person prototype which they say is close to going into production and Sharpe says it could be a life-saving option for people in remote areas people who can't get to an evacuation point or those who might not have the time and sure I didn't experience the real deal surviving a magnitude 9 earthquake packing up all my supplies and getting to my capsule in less than 10 minutes not to mention the full size waves that come with a tsunami a fifteen thousand dollar tsunami escape capsule might not be the solution for everyone but still being inside here felt a lot safer than being in the middle of the ocean without any protection when a world-shaking tsunami eventually does hit it probably won't feel like a Disneyland ride but with a bit of advanced engineering we might just have a solution to get us out alive I'm ready for so much more you can give me all your gun over you you\n"