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Tsunamigenic Earthquakes: Past and Present Milestones

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Abstract

We review a number of events which, taken individually, have significantly affected our understanding of the generation of tsunamis by earthquake sources and our efforts at mitigating their hazards, notably through the development of warning algorithms. Starting with the 1700 Cascadia earthquake, we examine how significant tsunamis have changed our views in fields as diverse as seismotectonics, the diversity of earthquake cycles, the development of warning algorithms, the response of communities at risk to warnings, and their education, the latter being either formal or rooted in ancestral heritage. We discuss in detail lessons from the 2004 Sumatra disasters and review the performance of warning centers and the response of affected populations during the nine significant tsunamis which have taken place since 2004.

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Notes

  1. The other known transatlantic tsunami took place on 31 March 1761; its source may have been an aftershock of the 1755 earthquake (O’Loughlin and Lander, 2003).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my many collaborators in the tsunami community for helping me shape many of the ideas contained in this work. They are too numerous to list individually, but a special acknowledgment goes to Costas Synolakis for sharing so many personal moments, in the field and the lab. I thank Phil Cummins for inviting me to give a presentation on this subject at the AOGS meeting in August 2009 in Singapore. The paper was improved by the comments of two reviewers.

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    Emile A. Okal

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Okal, E.A. Tsunamigenic Earthquakes: Past and Present Milestones. Pure Appl. Geophys. 168, 969–995 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-010-0215-9

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