He said 1000 feet, which makes it about ten times as tall as that big Tsunami in Alaska in 1958. If you look at the description of the wave created by the Baker shot at Bikini Atoll, it wasn't nearly that high:

"The disturbance created by the underwater burst caused a series of waves to move outward from the center of the explosion across the surface of Bikini lagoon. At 11 seconds after the detonation, the first wave had a maximum height of 94 feet and was about 1,000 feet from surface zero. This moved outward at high speed and was followed by a series of other waves. At 22,000 feet from surface zero, the ninth wave in the series was the highest with a height of 6 feet."

I think the 1000 feet mentioned in this article might come from a misinterpretation of "1000 feet from surface zero" which just means 1000 feet from the center of the explosion.

http://www.abomb1.org/nukeffct/enw77b2.html

[Edited because I can't read and was off by an order of magnitude on my first try.]

Doesn't this say that the 1958 Tsunami was 100 ft, not 1,000 ft, in height?

> the sudden displacement of water resulted in a megatsunami that destroyed vegetation up to 1,722 feet (525 m) above the height of the bay and a wave that traveled across the bay with a crest reported by witnesses to be on the order of 98 feet (30 m) in height.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_megatsunami

Ah, you're right: "A tsunami with a record run-up height of 1720 feet..."

I guess I should read harder.

Can anyone help me out with how the run-up height is ~17x greater than the wave height? This is because the wave hits the shore and the volume of water in the wave gets squished thin, making it temporarily higher?

Waves are different around atolls than continental shelfs. The closer to land the larger the wave would get.

It says feet, not meters, which makes it a lot more possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_megatsunami

That's because you misread the units as metres when they are actualy given as feet.