Re: Why did the palm trees survive the tsunami?

How did you determine that palms survived the tsunami better than other trees?
Perhaps it is just that there are so many palms in the tsunami area that it just
makes it seem that most survived. There was one widely reported story of a man
who survived the tsunami by clinging to a palm tree floating in the ocean that
was apparently uprooted by the tsunami, so not all palms survived.

The USDA Forest Service considers palms highly resistant to hurricane-related
damage such as uprooting, breakage by wind and salt water tolerance. Those
factors also apply to tsunami tolerance. I believe a major reason why palms
stand up to high winds and flooding is that the tree offers little resistance to
wind or water because the trunk is unbranched with leaves just at the top. Most
trees other than palms are highly branched and have leaves all along the
branches so offer much more resistance to wind or water. 

As mononcots, palms do not form a rigid woody trunk due to secondary growth as
in conifers and dicot trees, such as oaks, birch, beech, maple, etc. Palm trunks
seem more flexible than most tree trunks which would allow them to stand up
better to rapidly moving flood waters. 

I don't know if plant scientists have determined if the palm root system is
better at keeping palms upright in a tsunami than root systems of other trees.
Most of the evidence that palms stand up better to hurricanes seems to be based
on observations after major storms, rather than experiments. If a scientist
wanted to compare how different trees stood up to a tsunami, it would be rather
expensive because they would need areas of large trees of different species that
they could rapidly flood. Or they would need to develop an alternative method of
testing how strongly the root system holds the tree in place, perhaps by pulling
trees out of the ground with a winch and measuring the force required.  


References


Manage to Reduce Hurricane Damage


Hurricane Resistant Trees for Your Landscape


All About Palm Trees