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Where a continental earthquake will cause damage and loss of life on land from fires, damaged structures, and flying objects; a submarine earthquake alters the seabed, resulting in a series of waves, and depending on the length and magnitude of the earthquake, tsunami, which bear down on coastal cities causing property damage and loss of life.
A massive tsunami with waves up to 30 m (100 ft) high, known as the Boxing Day Tsunami after the Boxing Day holiday, or as the Asian Tsunami, [10] devastated communities along the surrounding coasts of the Indian Ocean, killing an estimated 227,898 people in 14 countries, violently in Aceh , and severely in Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu , and Khao Lak ...
Large earthquakes in these areas can cause the seafloor to rise and spark a tsunami. According to the National Weather Service, the U.S.’s most damaging tsunami was caused by the Great Alaska ...
Normal tsunamis result from displacement of the sea floor due to movements in the Earth's crust (plate tectonics). Powerful earthquakes may cause the sea floor to displace vertically on the order of tens of metres, which in turn displaces the water column above and leads to the formation of a tsunami.
The most important clue linking the tsunami in Japan and the earthquake in the Pacific Northwest comes from studies of tree rings (dendrochronology), which show that several "ghost forests" of red cedar trees in Oregon and Washington, killed by lowering of coastal forests into the tidal zone by the earthquake, have outermost growth rings that formed in 1699, the last growing season before the ...
Large tsunamis have occurred in the US and will again. A magnitude 9.2 earthquake in the Gulf of Alaska caused damage and loss of life along the West Coast in 1964. More than 150 tsunamis have ...
This subduction zone was responsible for the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. [15] In parts of the megathrust south of Java , referred to as the Java Trench , for the western part, M w 8.9 is possible, while in the eastern Java segment, M w 8.8 is possible, while if both were to rupture at the same time, the magnitude would be M w 9.1.
Prior to the 1980s, scientists thought that the subduction zone did not generate earthquakes like other subduction zones around the world, but research by Brian Atwater and Kenji Satake tied together evidence of a large tsunami on the Washington coast with documentation of an orphan tsunami in Japan (a tsunami without an associated earthquake ...