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NASA Challenges Long-Held Tsunami Formation Theory

tsunami
Photo taken March 11, 2011, by Sadatsugu Tomizawa and released via Jiji Press on March 21, 2011, showing tsunami waves hitting the coast of Minamisoma in Fukushima prefecture, Japan.

Published May 4, 2017 7:47 AM by The Maritime Executive

A new NASA study is challenging a long-held theory that tsunamis form and acquire their energy mostly from vertical movement of the seafloor.

An undisputed fact was that most tsunamis result from a massive shifting of the seafloor, usually from the subduction, or sliding, of one tectonic plate under another during an earthquake. Experiments conducted in wave tanks in the 1970s demonstrated that vertical uplift of the tank bottom could generate tsunami-like waves. 

In the following decade, Japanese scientists simulated horizontal seafloor displacements in a wave tank and observed that the resulting energy was negligible. This led to the current widely held view that vertical movement of the seafloor is the primary factor in tsunami generation.

In 2007, Tony Song, an oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, cast doubt on that theory after analyzing the powerful 2004 Sumatra earthquake in the Indian Ocean. Seismograph and GPS data showed that the vertical uplift of the seafloor did not produce enough energy to create a tsunami that powerful. But formulations by Song and his colleagues showed that once energy from the horizontal movement of the seafloor was factored in, all of the tsunami's energy was accounted for. 

After critically evaluating a series of wave tank experiments, Song has now concluded that horizontal seafloor displacement contributed more than half the energy that generated the 2004 Sumatra and the 2011 Tohoku tsunamis.

The finding further validate an approach developed by Song and his colleagues that uses GPS technology to detect a tsunami's size and strength for early warnings. The NASA-managed Global Differential Global Positioning System (GDGPS) is a very accurate real-time GPS processing system that can measure seafloor movement during an earthquake. 

As the land shifts, ground receiver stations nearer to the epicenter also shift. The stations can detect their movement every second through real-time communication with a constellation of satellites to estimate the amount and direction of horizontal and vertical land displacement that took place in the ocean. They developed computer models to incorporate that data with ocean floor topography and other information to calculate the size and direction of a tsunami.

"By identifying the important role of the horizontal motion of the seafloor, our GPS approach directly estimates the energy transferred by an earthquake to the ocean," Song said. "Our goal is to detect a tsunami's size before it even forms, for early warnings."

The study is published in Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans.