I received this photograph from a friend on mine here in joisey asking whether or not it was fake.The simple is that it is hard to tell. The light direction, strength and shadow sharpness seem consistent between the sea and the land, which is often a tell-tale sign of a doctored image. I have a nagging doubt about the 'scale' of the water: it doesn't seem to fit, the water looks smaller than I would imagine. However, here is the crux of the matter in this regard - I have no experience comparable to this and so I'm confronted by a pyrrhic doubt regarding my own ability to comprehend this. However, and glibly brushing that aside in my favour, there is the sheer magnitude of this wave, and nothing in the reports that I recall, nor that at a cursory investigation through the silvered bowl of the internet could reveal, indicated that the wave was that big. It was from what I can gather an average sized tsunami, in the region of 10-20m high. (Its the impact from the speed of the wave that causes so much destruction: tsumanis travel at approx. 500mph.)

The height of the wave is what makes me suspect the photograph. Using the building in the middle ground as a guide, a 10-20m high wave would be in the order of 3-6 storeys, yet its roughly as high as the building. (The effect of perspective at that distance wouldn't be very great.) Although its hard to count the number of floors exactly due to the poor quality of the image this but is not a wave of that magnitude.

Perhaps, its from another wave from another time and not doctored at all but just altered through a misleading context, or perhaps the waves that hit the nearest land were that high, I don't know really, but given what little i do know it doesn't really gel with the facts. Any thoughts?

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On a side note the largest wave recorded was in Alaska and was 518m high. I have no idea how to understand that fact. (Here is a better article with photographs.) Doommongers have also been speculating that the (sometimes) fair city of New York could drown under 150 feet waves from the collapse of the one of the canary islands.