The next wave in tsunami science

Last year's earthquake and tsunami was a catastrophe for Japan — but a problem averted for Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast, partly due to luck and partly due to the success of long-range tsunami tracking. Now researchers are working to bring that success closer to home. If a similar ocean wave were to target the U.S. coastline in the future — and seismologists say that's only a matter of time — the emergency response should be much improved, thanks to the lessons learned from last March's super-tsunami. Definitely there are a lot of lessons learned from a big event like that," Vasily Titov, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Center for Tsunami Research, told me this week. Titov and his colleagues, who are based at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, have focused for years on building better computer models to predict how tsunami waves will spread out from an undersea seismic shock like the one that rocked Japan. Tsunami trackers came in for a good deal of criticism after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which killed an estimated 230,000 people in 12 nations. Since then, government agencies have worked together to fill in the gaps in an oceanwide network of deep-sea and surface-buoy sensors — and the upgrades paid off big time last year. Readings from a network of more than 50 buoys — including the federal governnment's Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis system, or DART —tracked wave heights after a magnitude-9.0 shift in the ocean floor set off a giant wall of water. The waves rose as much as 6 feet in open ocean. "Ten years ago, people would say, 'Oh, it's not possible to have a tsunami that high,'" Titov said. "That was the event that I was hoping not to see in my life." The computer model correctly predicted the level of flooding that Hawaii would face, seven hours after the earthquake. That provided enough time for a proper evacuation. "Deaths were avoided in Hawaii — I'm pretty confident about that," Titov said. The model also showed that there'd be only minor impact on the West Coast, due to the fact that the tsunami wave arrived at low tide. "If the West Coast had high tide during tsunami, it would have been much different," Titov said. "There would have been flooding all over the place."