Joining forces to predict tsunamis: Pan-European approach to disaster preventionNovember 07, 2006Following a series of well documented natural disasters with grave human and economic consequences, the ability to predict these devastating events has once more come to the fore as a research priority for the European scientific community. This, amongst other things, is what leading scientists in ocean margin research came together to discuss at the recent EUROMARGINS conference in Bologna, Italy. Margins are the transition zones between the continents and the deep oceans. They are also often at the boundary between two tectonic plates.
EUROMARGINS is a European Collaborative Research (EUROCORES) Programme coordinated by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and supported by science funding agencies in ten European countries. Tsunami warning system Tsunamis are large waves presenting extreme threats to coastal areas. The largest recorded tsunami, which hit Alaska in 1958, loomed to a height of 520m. They can come about as a result of continental landslides, rock falls, submarine landslides or earthquakes. In the 1990s, four tsunamis ravaged Nicaragua, Indonesia, Japan and Papua New Guinea causing the loss of 4,000 lives and of course no one can forget the total devastation brought about by the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami where 230,000 people lost their lives. The Gulf of Cadiz has a history of both tsunamis and earthquakes. In fact, the whole Southern area of the Iberian and the facing North African coast are considered high risk areas. As recently as 21 May 2003, a tsunami wave reaching three metres hit the Balearic coastline in just 20 minutes from its origin far out at sea. It took sea levels 24 hours to recover and twenty boats sank. Despite the Mediterranean being a high risk area, surprisingly, there is no tsunami early warning system in place. "Our goal is to develop an integrated system using earthquakes as a source of tsunami detection with a 20 minute maximum time frame for the alarm to sound," explains one of the conference's external guest speakers Stefano Tinti from the recently launched TRANSFER initiative. Tinti came to talk to the EUROMARGINS community about the first ever funded European project to look at tsunamis with the purpose of developing a tsunami early warning system. This effort is ground-breaking and aims to understand the tsunami process, contribute to tsunami hazard and risk assessment and, to develop strategies for risk reduction. Research generated from the EUROMARGINS community has helped to make this project possible. Developing models One of the EUROMARGINS Principal Investigators Miquel Canals from the Universitat de Barcelona described the area between Ibiza and Mallorca in the Mediterranean as being covered in calcified rock rich in pockmarks of different sizes. This gives the sea bed the appearance of a giant 'orange peel'. Some of these pockmarks are as deep as 50m and more than 1km in diameter. Canal also described submarine landslides in the region, like the one off the Ebro shelf (known as the Big 95) that affected a seafloor area four times that of the island of Ibiza. While the pockmarks are indicative of fluid migration under the seafloor and fluid escape at the seafloor, the landslides around the islands deserve further investigation to assess their tsunamigenic potential. "The characteristics of a tsunami depends primarily on the volume and initial acceleration of the released sediment as well as the water depth" explains Carl Bonnevie Harbitz from the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) in Oslo. Harbitz and his colleagues at NGI and University of Oslo have developed models which can predict tsunamis caused by rock falls, submarine slides, earth quakes and even asteroid impacts. To validate and improve the models, Harbitz and his team have put much effort into back-calculating historical events. Using field observations from the 8200 BP submarine Storegga slide tsunami off Western Norway, the 1934 rockslide Tafjord tsunami and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami, the team has improved the reliability of their models. The complexity of the coastal region of the wave impact is also an important factor when developing reliability. Harbitz has applied this model to his native North Sea area and found that a possible future tsunami generated in for example the North Sea Fan area will start far off shore and will most likely not reach heights bigger than 1m by the time it reaches the shore. "Our model has also been used for prediction and hazard and risk assessment for tsunamis generated by rock slides, submarine slides, and earth quakes in several places internationally", says Harbitz. To wrap up, on the behalf of the TRANSFER initiative, Stefano Tinti urged the EUROMARGINS community to carry on with their important landslide research in order to be able to provide a more reliable tsunami alert system using both landslides and earthquakes as indicators. European Science Foundation | |||||||||||||||||||||
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Related Tsunami Current Events and Tsunami News Articles Discovered: World's Largest Tsunami Debris A line of massive boulders on the western shore of Tonga may be evidence of the most powerful volcano-triggered tsunami found to date. Up to 9 meters (30 feet) high and weighing up to 1.6 million kilograms (3.5 million pounds), the seven coral boulders are located 100 to 400 meters (300 to 1,300 feet) from the coast. May 2008 earthquake in China could be followed by another significant rupture Researchers analyzing the May 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China's Sichuan province have found that geological stress has significantly increased on three major fault systems in the region. Uncertain future for elephants of Thailand Worries over the future of Thailand' s famous elephants have emerged following an investigation by a University of Manchester team. A 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. More Tsunami Current Events and Tsunami News Articles |
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