We should follow up on stories of this sort and find out the geology of the myth. We would learn a lot, I think.
I think some of the Biblical archaeology looks at the various Biblical stories. I just learned (at church) that the town of Nazereth (Jesus’ hometown) was only mentioned in the Bible - no other sources (such as Joesephus, etc.) mention the name. But, archaelogy has found it (just south of Cana).
I’m not sure how much the scientists use the myths before hand, but they make sense afterwards.:
http://pnsn.org/outreach/native-american-stories/native-american-stories-overview
The 1980s was a decade of discovery of evidence for great earthquakes in the Cascadia Region. Tom Heaton and Hiroo Kanamori published a paper asserting the Cascadia Subduction Zone was indeed actively deforming and is likely to produce great Earthquakes.
Heaton followed this paper up with a paper about PNW Native American stories that inferred their people were impacted by tsunamis in the not too distant past. In the 1990s, PNSN Research Scientist Ruth Ludwin began collecting and organizing other Native American stories and traditions that seem to be related to earthquakes and their effects on the people of Cascadia before westerners arrived.
Brian Atwater, David Yamaguchi and others produced detailed evidence of abrupt land level changes and tsunami inundation along the coast of Washington state in the winter of 1699-1700.
Further work in the 1980s and 1990s refined our understanding of the great earthquake that occurred on January 26, 1700 at about 9 PM PST. The amazing specificity of date and time came through collaborations with Japanese scientists and historians who helped identify the Cascadia Subduction Zone as the source of a deadly “orphan tsunami” that flooded areas on the coast of Japan the following day.
Over the past 3,500 years these great earthquakes (~M9) have reoccurred 7 times with a average interval of 550 years though 4 of the events reoccurred between 200 and 400 years after the previous great quake. This research renewed interest in understanding how these events may have impacted the many thousands of Native Americans living here.