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TIL that out at sea, a tsunami is only about a metre high, and could pass a boat without being noticed. As it approaches the shore, it’s the sudden deceleration from about 800km/h to 50km/h which creates the immense wave

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oBEr8 TIL sweden nationalized their banks after their subprime recession.
DEve TIL that when the UK declared war on Japan after being attacked in 1941, Winston Churchill notified the Japanese government with a politely written letter. He said later, “Some people did not like this ceremonial style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.”
VMDjG TIL Lagos in Nigeria has a Brazilian Quarter. In the 1800s, formerly enslaved Afro-Brazilians began to return to Africa. They formed an exclusive business elite known as 'Agudas' who intermarried and built their community in the Brazilian style. Descendents hold an annual Brazilian style carnival.
Br0LW TIL Kazakh author Rollan Seisenbayev wrote a novel about the human-engineered collapse of the Aral Sea, first published in in the final years of the Soviet Union. The Aral's shrinkage left seaside villages and beached shipping vessels far from the shoreline, destroying the fisheries
7rbKr TIL that while young Robert E. Lee worked surveying the boundary between Ohio and Michigan, he jokingly referred in a letter to a snake he killed in a lighthouse as the lighthouse's keeper. Lee's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman misinterpreted this as an admission that Lee killed a human keeper.