|
Huge tsunami spurred progress, revealed needs
December 05, 2005The catastrophic tsunami that struck Indonesia and East Asia almost a year ago has done much to heighten the interest, research programs and preparations in the United States for events of this type, but experts say there are areas that need more attention and challenges yet to be met.
Dec. 26 will mark the first anniversary of the tsunami that claimed the lives of about 275,000 people and struck with waves up to 100 feet high, one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.
Since that time, Congress has worked on legislation that would enable the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to spend $35 million per year for a major expansion and improvement of warning systems in the United States, and support other smaller research or disaster planning initiatives around the nation in a U.S. Tsunami Warning Network.
But scientists at Oregon State University, which operates one of the world's leading tsunami research facilities, say more studies are necessary on expected wave behavior at specific coastal locations, the probable impact on structures and measures that could be taken to reduce casualties and damage.
"The significant support to NOAA is a good sign that the risks of tsunamis are finally being taken more seriously," said Harry Yeh, the Edwards Professor of Ocean Engineering at OSU and a leading international expert on tsunamis. "The majority of that will be focused on early detection systems in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea to improve warnings about tsunamis originating from distant locations."
However, according to Yeh and Dan Cox, an associate professor and director of the Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory at OSU (http://wave.oregonstate.edu/), there are still pressing educational, research and planning needs. They have special urgency in the Pacific Northwest - the North American location most vulnerable to a tsunami that would strike with little forewarning - from the nearby Cascadia Subduction Zone.
"Much of our current approach to tsunami preparation is about warning systems and getting people out of the way," Cox said. "In some cases, that's appropriate. But there are also serious questions about how practical it will be to evacuate large numbers of people in towns that are accessible by a two-lane road. We will have only a very short time - 20 to 30 minutes, not hours - in the case of the Cascadia Subduction Zone tsunami."
"So we should consider other approaches to protect public safety like designing hotels or parking garages that would be strong enough and high enough to provide a local haven for people who would not be able to reach higher ground," he said. "The emphasis on warning systems also does little to help the personnel responding to the disaster. For example, will debris make some roads inaccessible?"
Studies addressing those topics are conducted at OSU in its Tsunami Wave Basin, a sophisticated, $4.8-million facility in which scientists can simulate, in miniature, the forces and behavior of waves as they approach a coastline with various features and types of undersea topography. Researchers all over the world use the facility, the largest of its type in the world, for advanced tsunami research.
And last year, both Yeh and OSU civil engineering professor Solomon Yim did field research in East Asia on the behavior and impacts of the tsunami there.
"One big change we need is better interdisciplinary research in this field," Yeh said. "We have to get seismologists and marine geologists talking to civil engineers, so we can get better tsunami-source information to propagation models for prediction of coastal effects. We need to have social scientists working with disaster planners so that evacuation plans are realistic and actually work in the short time frame we may have available. We soon plan to begin research on the social dynamics of this problem."
In Oregon, Yeh said, there's also an inadequate analysis of the specific marine terrain at various coastal towns and the implications that would have for a tsunami wave run-up. Much more work also needs to be done on the impacts of large, heavy debris sloshing back and forth in repeated tsunami waves - a problem vividly illustrated in the enormous structural damage caused by the East Asian tsunami.
With more research, it might be possible to construct at least some future buildings with methods that would better resist damage or destruction by tsunami waves, the OSU researchers say. The Oregon Sea Grant Program has provided a two-year, $170,000 grant to support fundamental research in this area.
"The number of fatalities from earthquakes in the U.S. is actually very low, because a long time ago we realized the dangers they pose and changed our building codes to start planning for them," Cox said. "But we don't have comparable building codes for tsunami-resistant structures."
The major tsunami of last year has also caused a surge of student interest in study and research on this field, the OSU experts said, that could be tapped to better prepare the scientists of the future who will continue to deal with the threats posed by these catastrophic events.
Some experts say there is a 10-14 percent chance that there could be a massive earthquake and tsunami on the Cascadia Subduction Zone within 50 years. The last such event is believed to have happened in 1700, and 23 major earthquakes have been recorded on this fault zone, which runs from northern California to Vancouver Island, in the past 10,000 years.
Oregon State University
But scientists at Oregon State University, which operates one of the world's leading tsunami research facilities, say more studies are necessary on expected wave behavior at specific coastal locations, the probable impact on structures and measures that could be taken to reduce casualties and damage.
"The significant support to NOAA is a good sign that the risks of tsunamis are finally being taken more seriously," said Harry Yeh, the Edwards Professor of Ocean Engineering at OSU and a leading international expert on tsunamis. "The majority of that will be focused on early detection systems in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea to improve warnings about tsunamis originating from distant locations."
However, according to Yeh and Dan Cox, an associate professor and director of the Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory at OSU (http://wave.oregonstate.edu/), there are still pressing educational, research and planning needs. They have special urgency in the Pacific Northwest - the North American location most vulnerable to a tsunami that would strike with little forewarning - from the nearby Cascadia Subduction Zone.
"Much of our current approach to tsunami preparation is about warning systems and getting people out of the way," Cox said. "In some cases, that's appropriate. But there are also serious questions about how practical it will be to evacuate large numbers of people in towns that are accessible by a two-lane road. We will have only a very short time - 20 to 30 minutes, not hours - in the case of the Cascadia Subduction Zone tsunami."
"So we should consider other approaches to protect public safety like designing hotels or parking garages that would be strong enough and high enough to provide a local haven for people who would not be able to reach higher ground," he said. "The emphasis on warning systems also does little to help the personnel responding to the disaster. For example, will debris make some roads inaccessible?"
Studies addressing those topics are conducted at OSU in its Tsunami Wave Basin, a sophisticated, $4.8-million facility in which scientists can simulate, in miniature, the forces and behavior of waves as they approach a coastline with various features and types of undersea topography. Researchers all over the world use the facility, the largest of its type in the world, for advanced tsunami research.
And last year, both Yeh and OSU civil engineering professor Solomon Yim did field research in East Asia on the behavior and impacts of the tsunami there.
"One big change we need is better interdisciplinary research in this field," Yeh said. "We have to get seismologists and marine geologists talking to civil engineers, so we can get better tsunami-source information to propagation models for prediction of coastal effects. We need to have social scientists working with disaster planners so that evacuation plans are realistic and actually work in the short time frame we may have available. We soon plan to begin research on the social dynamics of this problem."
In Oregon, Yeh said, there's also an inadequate analysis of the specific marine terrain at various coastal towns and the implications that would have for a tsunami wave run-up. Much more work also needs to be done on the impacts of large, heavy debris sloshing back and forth in repeated tsunami waves - a problem vividly illustrated in the enormous structural damage caused by the East Asian tsunami.
With more research, it might be possible to construct at least some future buildings with methods that would better resist damage or destruction by tsunami waves, the OSU researchers say. The Oregon Sea Grant Program has provided a two-year, $170,000 grant to support fundamental research in this area.
"The number of fatalities from earthquakes in the U.S. is actually very low, because a long time ago we realized the dangers they pose and changed our building codes to start planning for them," Cox said. "But we don't have comparable building codes for tsunami-resistant structures."
The major tsunami of last year has also caused a surge of student interest in study and research on this field, the OSU experts said, that could be tapped to better prepare the scientists of the future who will continue to deal with the threats posed by these catastrophic events.
Some experts say there is a 10-14 percent chance that there could be a massive earthquake and tsunami on the Cascadia Subduction Zone within 50 years. The last such event is believed to have happened in 1700, and 23 major earthquakes have been recorded on this fault zone, which runs from northern California to Vancouver Island, in the past 10,000 years.
Oregon State University
Tsunami News and Current Tsunami Events RSSA world novelty for an improved tsunami early warning
After completing their simulation component in the German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS), the team for tsunami modelling of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association has presented the currently leading software system for tsunami events with the potential for catastrophe.
Stress Buildup Precedes Large Sumatra Quakes
The island of Sumatra, Indonesia, has shaken many times with powerful earthquakes since the one that wrought the infamous 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Now, scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences are harnessing information from these and earlier quakes to determine where the next ones will likely occur, and how big they will be.
Big quakes spark jolts worldwide
Until 1992, when California's magnitude-7.3 Landers earthquake set off small jolts as far away as Yellowstone National Park, scientists did not believe large earthquakes sparked smaller tremors at distant locations.
1 year after Solomon Islands, scientists learn barrier to earthquakes weaker than expected
On the one year anniversary of a devastating earthquake and tsunami in the Solomon Islands that killed 52 people and displaced more than 6,000, scientists are revising their understanding of the potential for similar giant earthquakes in other parts of the globe.
Scientists obtain core samples from subsea fault system off Japan
The third expedition of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program's Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment (NanTroSEIZE) completed its mission off the Kii Peninsula today.
Newly discovered active fault building new Dalmatian Islands off Croatian coast
A newly identified fault that runs under the Adriatic Sea is actively building more of the famously beautiful Dalmatian Islands and Dinaride Mountains of Croatia, according to a new research report.
Thousands of Crop Varieties from Four Corners of the World Depart for Arctic Seed Vault
At the end of January, more than 200,000 crop varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East-drawn from vast seed collections maintained by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)-will be shipped to a remote island near the Arctic Circle, where they will be stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a facility capable of preserving their vitality for thousands of years.
Rich nations' environmental footprints tread heavily on poor countries
The environmental damage caused by rich nations disproportionately impacts poor nations and costs them more than their combined foreign debt, according to a first-ever global accounting of the dollar costs of countries' ecological footprints.
Deep-ocean researchers target tsunami zone near Japan
Rice University Earth scientist Dale Sawyer and colleagues last month reported the discovery of a strong variation in the tectonic stresses in a region of the Pacific Ocean notorious for generating devastating earthquakes and tsunamis in southeastern Japan.
Status quo of the tsunami early warning system for the Indian Ocean
The German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System for the Indian Ocean (GITEWS) runs on track. Main milestones like the development of the automatic data processing software SeisComP3, as well as the underwater communication for the transmission of the pressure data from the ocean floor to a warning centre are already finalised.
More Tsunami News Articles
 | Tsunamis and Other Natural Disasters (Magic Tree House Rsrch Gdes(R)) by Mary Pope Osborne, Natalie Pope Boyce |
 | Night of the Howling Dogs by Graham Salisbury |
 | Escaping the Giant Wave by Peg Kehret |
 | The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? by David Bentley Hart |
 | The Loch by Steve Alten |
 | Elemental: The Tsunami Relief Anthology: Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Steven Savile, Alethea Kontis |
 | Maelstrom (Rifters Trilogy) by Peter Watts |
 | Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (Latin America Otherwise) by Charles F. Walker |
 | MAMA: a TRUE story, in which a BABY HIPPO loses his MAMA during a TSUNAMI, but finds a new home, and a new MAMA by Jeanette Winter |
 | God's Tsunami: Understanding Israel and EndTime Prophecy by Peter Tsukahira |
| © 2008 BrightSurf.com |