Vanuatu earthquake and tsunami cause much damage, few casualties

Computational Earthquake and Tsunami Research

U nderstanding and mitigating the effects of disasters requires the integration of research and practice in multiple science, engineering, technology, and social science fields to create a world that’s more resilient in terms of public safety, economic strength, and collective welfare. The January/February 2011 issue of CiSE explored hurricane prediction.1 Hurricanes are one of many natural dis...

Recent massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and devastating tsunami.

At 14:46 on March 11, 2011, the magnitude-9.0 earthquake attacked Sendai and neighboring cities distributed along the northeast coast of Honshu Island, Japan. Its epicenter is located 130 km east of Sendai (Fig. 1). Unfortunate ly, the strong earthquake generated devastating tsunamis that destroyed many towns and villages near the seashore in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures. The natura...

Tsunami early warning using earthquake rupture duration

[1] Effective tsunami early warning for coastlines near a tsunamigenic earthquake requires notification within 5–15 minutes. We have shown recently that tsunamigenic earthquakes have an apparent rupture duration, T0, greater than about 50 s. Here we show that T0 gives more information on tsunami importance than moment magnitude, Mw, and we introduce a procedure using seismograms recorded near a...

Advances in earthquake and tsunami sciences and disaster risk reduction since the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami

The December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the worst tsunami disaster in the world’s history with more than 200,000 casualties. This disaster was attributed to giant size (magnitude M ~ 9, source length >1000 km) of the earthquake, lacks of expectation of such an earthquake, tsunami warning system, knowledge and preparedness for tsunamis in the Indian Ocean countries. In the last ten years, sei...