Tsunami Science

One thing now obvious from this article is that there is plenty a government can do to protect and warn its people living on the coast.  The simplest step is to ensure every land transfer has a declaration from a geologist that no tsunami debris beds underlie the property.  We did just that with pollution problems.  The result there was to watch gas stations been cleaned up as a redevelopment step.

A simple bore hole will suffice and a map review will just as easily identify areas of natural risk.  What is important is that these events do repeat and the majority is from such repeaters.  Thus the past two tsunamis both had antecedents that would have caught this problem at the land transfer office and created insurance pressure to build elsewhere.

It is also plain that the sea bed sources of these events are also obvious and can be mapped.  This must be done as we must map the geological history of every affected coast.

As important, a complete mapping could easily allow us to map back to unexpected sources.

For example, we know that the Atlantic had a major event around 1159BC presently assigned to Hekla.  Yet the Hekla eruption may have been part of a major deep ocean event we have not mapped and should be aware of.  Certainly a similar such event appears to have happened over ten thousand years ago leaving outflow material all over the north Atlantic.  Even that is likely part of a much bigger event.

The take home is that it is within the role of governments to clearly identify plausible tsunami generators, map their activity, and to prevent building on tsunami debris plain.  All this would have massively reduced the loss of live we have just experienced.  Happily, what I have just described is fairly cheap and easy enough.  Simply ending insurance coverage for at risk areas will in time induce removal of buildings at risk.  We also have the time to allow these natural means to work themselves out.

We can take similar steps with hurricane exposure and should.  It is obvious today those large vulnerable sections of New Orleans will simply not be rebuilt. Nor should they be rebuilt.  Unfortunately it does take a hurricane for governments and people to come to their senses.  It seems to have taken a couple of tsunamis to generate a similar will to solve this problem.

The bottom line is that tsunamis and hurricanes are avoidable disasters.  Earthquakes are quite another matter and need special hardware to ride through the event that is slowly emerging.

Tsunami Science

The Calm Before the Wave

Where and when will the next tsunami hit?

By Tim Folger

Photograph by John Stanmeyer

Jin Sato is the mayor of a town that no longer exists.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/02/tsunami/folger-text

Minamisanriku, a quiet fishing port north of Sendai in northeastern Japan, disappeared last March 11. Sato nearly did too. The disaster started at 2:46 p.m., about 80 miles east in the Pacific, along a fault buried deep under the seafloor. A 280-mile-long block of Earth's crust suddenly lurched to the east, parts of it by nearly 80 feet. Sato had just wrapped up a meeting at the town hall. "We were talking about the town's tsunami defenses," he says. Another earthquake had jolted the region two days earlier—a precursor, scientists now realize, to the March 11 temblor, which has turned out to be the largest in Japan's history.

When the ground finally stopped heaving, after five excruciating minutes, Minamisanriku was still mostly intact. But the sea had just begun to heave. Sato and a few dozen others ran next door to the town's three-story disaster-readiness center. Miki Endo, a 24-year-old woman working on the second floor, started broadcasting a warning over the town's loudspeakers: "Please head to higher ground!" Sato and most of his group headed up to the roof. From there they watched the tsunami pour over the town's 18-foot-high seawall. They listened to it crush or sweep away everything in its path. Wood-frame houses snapped; steel girders groaned. Then dark gray water surged over the top of their building. Endo's broadcasts abruptly stopped.

Some 16,000 people died that day, most of them along hundreds of miles of coast in the Tohoku region, and nearly 4,000 are still missing. The tsunami eradicated several towns and villages in Tohoku and left hundreds of thousands homeless. In Minamisanriku the killed or missing number about 900 of 17,700 inhabi­tants, including Miki Endo, whose body was not found until April 23. Sato survived by climbing a radio antenna on the roof and clinging to it. "I think I was underwater for three or four minutes," he says. "It's hard to say." Many of the 30 or so other people on the roof tried to hang on to the iron railings at its edge. The waves kept coming all night long, and for the first few hours they repeatedly inundated the three-story building. In the morning only ten people remained on the roof.

Japan leads the world in preparing for earthquakes and tsunamis. It has spent billions retrofitting old buildings and equipping new ones with shock absorbers. High seawalls shield many coastal towns, and well-marked tsunami evacuation routes lead to high ground or to tall, strong buildings. On March 11 government seismologists had barely stopped hugging their computer monitors to keep them from crashing to the floor when their first tsunami warning went out.

Together these measures saved many thousands of lives; Miki Endo alone may have saved thousands. The Tohoku earthquake itself—a magnitude 9—did much less damage than it would have in other countries. But between 16,000 and 20,000 died because of the tsunami—a death toll comparable to that caused by an earthquake and tsunami in the same region in 1896.

Japan's defenses have improved tremendously since then, but its population has tripled. Its coasts are far more crowded. The same is true all over the world, in countries that are much less prepared. In the Indian Ocean, where the deadliest tsunami in history killed nearly 230,000 people in 2004, most of them in Indonesia, a similar disaster has been forecast for sometime within the next 30 years. In the United States, where a tsunami devastated the Pacific Northwest 300 years ago, when it was sparsely inhabited, geologists say another is inevitable. It's likely there will be many Minamisanrikus in the decades ahead.

Sato had survived a big tsunami before. In 1960, when he was eight, a 14-foot wave killed 41 people in Minamisanriku. The seawall was built after that, to a height of 5.5 meters, a little over 18 feet. "We thought we would be safe," Sato says. "Seismologists had told us to prepare for a tsunami that might be five and a half to six meters high. But this one was three times that height." Afterward, in the landscape of debris that had been his town, almost the only thing that remained intact was the seawall.

Tsunamis strike somewhere in the world almost every year, and giant ones have arguably changed history. Some archaeologists have argued, for instance, that a Mediterranean tsunami struck the north shore of Crete a bit over 3,500 years ago; the disaster, they say, sent Minoan civilization, one of the most sophisticated of the age, into a tailspin, leading it to succumb to Mycenaean Greeks. In 1755, when an earthquake and tsunami killed tens of thousands in Lisbon, the tragedy had a lasting impact on Western thought: It helped demolish the complacent optimism of the day. In Voltaire's novel Candide the blinkered philosopher Pangloss arrives in Lisbon during the catastrophe, persists in arguing that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds," and gets hanged for his trouble. Voltaire's withering satire made it a little harder to be Panglossian—to believe that a benevolent God designed an optimal Earth.

In the fifth century B.C. the Greek historian Thucydides was the first person to document the connection between earthquakes and tsunamis. He noticed that the first sign of a tsunami is often the abrupt draining of a harbor, as the sea pulls away from the coast. "Without an earthquake I do not see how such things could happen," he wrote. Actually they can. The Minoan tsunami was triggered by the cataclysmic eruption of Thira, a volcanic island 70 miles north of Crete in the Aegean. And landslides can cause local tsunamis, such as the one that surged 1,700 feet up a hillside in Lituya Bay, Alaska, in 1958 (see photo). All it takes is a large mass of rock moving abruptly in a large mass of water—not necessarily the ocean.

The vast majority of tsunamis, however, including the Tohoku one, are caused by seafloor earthquakes along faults called subduction zones. Most are in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Along those boundaries two of Earth's tectonic plates collide, and the one carrying dense oceanic crust dives under the more buoyant continental one, forming a deep-ocean trench. Normally this happens smoothly, at a rate of a few inches a year. But at some times and places the plates become stuck—the peak of a subducting seamount might snag on the bottom of a continent, for example. After centuries the accumulated strain overwhelms the friction, and the plates shudder past each other. Off Japan last March the quake began miles below the seafloor and then spread up the sloping contact between the plates to the Japan Trench at the seafloor. It released the energy equivalent of 8,000 Hiroshima bombs. A sizable fraction of that went into motion of the seafloor, which raised and lowered the water above it—thus creating a tsunami.

Ordinary ocean waves are mere wind-driven wrinkles in the sea surface, but a tsunami moves the entire water column, from the seafloor up. The initial disturbance spreads out in opposite directions from the fault, in long wave fronts that may be a few hundred miles apart. In deep water offshore they're barely noticeable. They grow to dangerous heights only in shallow water, as they pile up against a coast—and they can remain dangerous even after they've crossed a whole ocean, barreling at the speed of a jetliner. The tsunami that savaged Japan last March swept a man in California out to sea; it broke Manhattan-size blocks of ice off the frozen margins of Antarctica. The tsunami that took 41 lives in Minamisanriku in 1960 was triggered by a magnitude 9.5 earthquake off Chile, the largest quake on record.

The Indonesian tsunami of December 26, 2004, killed people all around the Indian Ocean. It began off the northwest coast of Sumatra with a sudden, thousand-mile-long rupture—and magnitude 9.1 quake—on the Sunda megathrust, a fault along which part of the Indian Ocean floor subducts under Indonesia. Indonesia suffered more than any other country, with nearly 170,000 dead—more than half of them in Banda Aceh, the capital of the north Sumatran province of Aceh. But some 60,000 more died in Sri Lanka, in India, and in other countries around the basin, as far away as Africa.

In the wake of that unprecedented disaster several countries worked together to expand the use of a tsunami-detecting system that had been developed in the United States by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The system consists of an instrument anchored to the seafloor—called a tsunameter—that measures pressure changes caused by a passing tsunami. The tsunameter sends a signal to a surface buoy, which relays the data to a satellite, which broadcasts the information to warning centers around the world.

By 2004 only six such detectors had been deployed, all in the Pacific. There were none in the Indian Ocean, and in any event many countries in the region had no national warning centers that could have alerted local communities. That policy blunder had tragic consequences. In Sumatra people had only a few minutes to run, but the tsunami took two hours to reach India, and some 16,000 people died there. "It was totally unnecessary," says Paramesh Banerjee, a geophysicist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. "Technically it would have been relatively easy to install a tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean."

There are now 53 detector buoys operating in the world's oceans, including 6 of a planned 27 in the Indian Ocean. So a repetition of the 2004 horror, in which the tsunami traveled for hours and still caught people by surprise, is less likely. But buoys would not have helped in Sumatra. People living on coasts near a rupturing fault can't wait for confirmation that a tsunami is on its way, which it often isn't; they must flee as soon as the quake hits. The Japanese warning system relies not only on tsunameters but also on seismometers—a thousand of them blanket the country, the densest network anywhere—combined with a computer model that forecasts the scale of a tsunami from the magnitude and location of the quake.

In March the system, which is run by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), did not work perfectly. JMA's crucial first estimate, while the ground was still shaking, put the quake magnitude at 7.9—whereas later analysis revealed a quake that, at magnitude 9, was 12 times larger. The tsunami forecast warned of waves of ten feet or more—whereas they reached 50 feet in Minamisanriku and in some places perhaps even higher. But the human response to the warning was imperfect as well. "I think this time many people who lived above the high-water mark of the 1960 tsunami didn't bother to run," Jin Sato says. "Many of them died." The town's seawall, he thinks, also gave people a false sense of security.

The size of the earthquake and tsunami shocked seismologists. The Indonesian quake had ruptured a thousand miles of fault, the Tohoku quake only 280 miles—and yet the latter produced a magnitude 9 quake. Most geologists didn't think the Japan Trench could do that, even with a longer rupture. The oceanic crust there is old, cold, and dense, and scientists reasoned it would sink beneath Japan too readily and with too little friction to generate such a big quake.

Yet there was evidence that such a quake was possible. More than a decade ago scientists from Tohoku University, in Sendai, dug into the black mud around their coastal city and discovered three separate layers of sand that extended almost three miles inland. Abundant marine plankton in the sand layers showed they had been deposited by giant tsunamis at intervals of 800 to 1,100 years over the previous 3,000 years. The researchers' paper was published in 2001 in the Japanese Journal of Natural Disaster Science. It concluded with a warning: Because the last tsunami had struck Sendai more than 1,100 years earlier, the risk of another soon was very high. But to Japanese policymakers the uncertainty in that forecast seemed high too. When the tsunami came last March, it deposited another layer of sand at least two and a half miles inland.

"I think all subduction zones are guilty until proven otherwise," says Kerry Sieh. Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, is one of the world's leading paleoseismologists—he plumbs the geologic record for evidence of ancient earthquakes and tsunamis. He's a delicately built man of 61, with graying, neatly trimmed hair. The historical record—and especially the modern instrumental record—is too short, he says. It absolves long-dormant faults around the world that very likely could generate killer tsunamis. "We must assume every long subduction zone is capable of producing great earthquakes and tsunamis," Sieh says. "We can't assume that any megathrust is gradually and harmlessly releasing strain."

Sieh pulls up a map on his computer. "This is the Manila Trench," he says, pointing to a line that begins off the west coast of the Philippines and continues north to Taiwan. "It's 800 miles long and hasn't done anything big in 500 years. If it broke in a magnitude 9, it would have very serious consequences along the Chinese coast—the tsunami would focus right on Hong Kong and Macau. We don't know if it will break, but I think we have to assume that it can. And there are many others."

Among them is the Cascadia subduction zone, a 600-mile-long offshore fault that runs from northern California to southern British Columbia. Geologists have found sand deposits up and down the coast that were laid down by a tsunami 312 years ago, in 1700. Recent evidence from seafloor sediment cores suggests to some that about 40 earthquakes have occurred along the Cascadia fault zone over the past 10,000 years, an average of one every 250 years; other researchers estimate the recurrence interval at 500 years. When the fault does rupture, most agree, the earthquake could be as large as the one that hit Japan last March, and the tsunami could reach the coast in 20 minutes.

A lot will depend on the season, says Nathan Wood, a geographer with the U.S. Geological Survey in Vancouver, Washington. "The Pacific Northwest coast is sparsely populated for the most part, and many people are less than a mile from high ground," Wood says. "But in the summer there can be 100,000 people on the coast. We could have tens of thousands of deaths."

In Washington there are tsunami evacuation signs, tall towers on the beaches to broadcast warnings, and tsunami information booklets in hotel rooms, next to the Gideon Bibles. But evacuation centers are sparse, and not everyone has access to high ground. Ocean Shores, a resort town that NOAA lists as "tsunami-ready," lies on a narrow peninsula with no high ground and just one two-lane road to safety; 5,500 people live there year-round, many more in the summer. One evening last summer I drove around the town with Jody Bourgeois, a geologist at the University of Washington. "These people are toast, soggy toast," she said glumly.

Seattle, tucked away in Puget Sound behind the Olympic Peninsula, would probably not be hard hit by the tsunami, though it would certainly feel the shaking from a Cascadia quake. But geologists have discovered smaller, shallower cracks in the crust that extend under Puget Sound. "The picture has just started to come together in the last two decades," says Bourgeois. "It's a major, major hazard." The earthquake from a shallow fault could be extremely destructive, and a moderate tsunami launched right off Seattle might be even more damaging than a giant one off the coast. It's not clear how often such events happen in Puget Sound. The last one was about a thousand years ago.

The fault that most worries Sieh, though, is the Sunda megathrust. He had been studying it for a decade before it caused the 2004 tsunami; a few years ago he gave up a tenured professorship at Caltech and moved to Singapore in part to be closer to the fault. It stretches 3,700 miles from Myanmar to Australia. The 2004 quake happened near the northern end. "That particular stretch, from northern Sumatra up to the Andaman Islands, was on nobody's radar screen," says Sieh.

He had been working off Sumatra but several hundred miles to the south, measuring the ages of dead coral reefs. When the seafloor rises during an earthquake, it can thrust a reef above water, killing the corals; radiometric dating reveals when that happened. By 2003 Sieh and his colleagues had reconstructed a disturbing seismic history for west central Sumatra.

"We found what we call supercycles—clusters of big earthquakes occurring at regular intervals," he says. For at least the past 700 years pairs of large earthquakes had occurred about every 200 years on that segment of the Sunda megathrust, with the earthquakes in each pair separated by roughly 30 years. There had been a pair around 1350 and 1380, another in the early to mid 1600s, and a third in 1797 and 1833—two centuries ago. It looked like another pair of quakes was due.

The discovery worried Sieh so much that in July 2004 he and his colleagues began distributing posters and brochures on the Mentawai Islands, where they were doing their research, warning people about tsunamis. Five months later northern Sumatra was devastated, and Sieh's group received a lot of publicity. "We got credit we didn't deserve," he says. "Our forecast was for a different part of the fault." But that forecast still stands—in fact, says Sieh, the first of the anticipated pair of quakes already happened, in September 2007. A magnitude 8.4, it did comparatively minor damage. At Padang, capital of the province of West Sumatra, the tsunami was only around three feet high. Padang is a low-lying city of more than 800,000. Sieh fears it may not fare as well the next time.

"There's never been a more precise forecast of a giant earthquake, period," he says. "Our forecast is for an 8.8 magnitude earthquake in the next 30 years. Nobody can say whether it will be 30 seconds from now or 30 months. But we can say it's very likely to happen within 30 years.

"What are you going to do?" he goes on. "Move the whole city for something that happens once every 200 years? That for me is the quintessential human predicament in regard to these very unlikely but very consequential events. The fundamental problem is not that scientists don't know enough, and it's not that engineers don't engineer enough. The fundamental problem is that there are seven billion of us, and too many of us are living in places that are dangerous. We've built ourselves into situations where we simply can't get away. And I think this will be a century of paying the consequences."

When the tsunami hits Padang, most people will have no high ground to run to and no more than 20 minutes to run. Much of the city stands less than 15 feet above sea level. The waves could inundate nearly everything within roughly a mile of the waterfront. The open-air restaurants that line the harbor will be swept away first; dark water will surge down streets clogged with motorbikes; thousands of flimsy one- and two-story homes and shops will vanish. The death toll is likely to be much higher than in Japan last March—probably closer to the 90,000 lost in Banda Aceh.

Life in Banda Aceh these days blends the horrific and the miraculous. The cataclysm that left the city strewn with contorted corpses, stripped naked by the waves, also brought peace, ending decades of violent conflict between Acehnese secessionists and the Indonesian government. "During the war you would also see bodies in the streets," says Syarifah Marlina Al Mazhir, program coordinator for the American Red Cross in Indonesia and a Banda Aceh resident. "The tsunami changed everything. And now we can go out at night!" A massive infusion of aid has helped rebuild the city, and young people pack its innumerable cafés late into the night. But everyone knows someone who died on December 26, 2004. "Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can still hear people screaming," one woman told me. In a small park children too young to remember play on a slide in the shadow of a 200-foot-long, 2,600-ton ship, preserved where the tsunami dropped it, on top of some houses, more than a mile inland.

On a sultry July morning in Padang, an elementary school about a half mile from the beach is drilling for the inevitable. At about 10 a.m. an alarm bell rings, and children erupt from their classrooms into the small, sandy courtyard—boys in white shirts and red pants, girls in white blouses and head scarves and ankle-length red skirts. Squatting in circles, they hold their small backpacks over their heads to protect them from debris that might fall during an earthquake. They all chant in unison. "They're repeating the 99 names of Allah," says Patra Rina Dewi. " ‘The Merciful, the Compassionate, the Guardian.' It's to keep them calm during a real emergency."

Patra, 39, is the energetic head of a small nonprofit tsunami-awareness organization called Kogami, which she and a few friends founded after seeing reports from Banda Aceh. Under pressure from Kogami, Padang has already marked 32 evacuation routes, and nine of a planned hundred multistory shelters are under construction to allow some people to escape the waves. Meanwhile Patra and her staff of 16 have started tsunami drills in schools like this one. Because there is no high ground nearby, the 567 students here have been drilled to run about two miles inland. But the 80 or so first graders can't run fast enough. "The first graders need 40 minutes to reach the safe area," says Elivia Murni, one of the teachers. "They will disappear if the tsunami comes. We won't be able to save them."

There are about a thousand schools along the coast of West Sumatra, and Kogami has started training programs in 232. It won't even try in some of the fishing villages that dot the coast northwest of Padang. "Sometimes I can't sleep at night," Patra says as we leave one of those villages. Lush hills rise to the east, but broad, muddy rice fields would make it impossible to reach the hills in time. "There are no escape routes for them here," Patra says. "If we told them about the tsunami danger, we would only leave them feeling hopeless."

When March 12 finally dawned in Minamisanriku, Jin Sato and his diminished band on the roof were cold, sodden, and utterly exhausted. They climbed down fishing nets that had washed up against the red steel skeleton of the gutted building and made their way up a nearby hill, where other survivors were gathering. Sato's office is now in a prefab building on that hill. He's 60 and trimly built, with thick black hair and glasses and a level, serious gaze. His hands are scarred from gripping the radio antenna. Buddhist prayer beads encircle his left wrist.

The town Sato grew up in is gone, but he is still responsible for many of its people, who are living in shelters or temporary housing. The land here dropped more than two feet after the earthquake, so large parts of the former town flood at high tide. Resurrecting Minamisanriku may prove impossible, and that is a source of anxiety for the survivors. "People want to stay here, where their ancestors lived and died," says Sato. "They don't want to move."