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What Are the Warning Signs of a Tsunami?

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By Eija Rissanen, eHow Contributor

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After the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004, several countries updated their tsunami warning systems and started to educate their citizens about the warning signs of a tsunami and what to do in case a tsunami is approaching. If you live or travel in areas prone to tsunamis, knowing the warning signs and what to do can save your life.

1. What Is a Tsunami

o Tsunami is a series of waves caused by a massive landslide or earthquake either on land or at the sea floor. The tsunami wave train comes in as a series of waves that can be separated from five minutes to an hour. The first wave is not necessarily the most dangerous. The size of the waves can be different in different locations. Wait in a safe place until the entire tsunami is over, which can be hours. Never try to surf a tsunami wave.

Tsunami Warning System

o The Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific was established to monitor the seismological and tidal stations to better evaluate the earthquakes able to cause a tsunami. It is intended to warn any country in danger from a tsunami in any part of the region. The system records pressure changes of the sea floor and sends the information to sensors on buoys and then to warning stations via satellites. If necessary, the warning centers issue a tsunami warning via radio and TV stations for the regions in question.

Ground Shaking

o A local earthquake is often the first warning of a possible tsunami. If you feel an earthquake in a tsunami-prone area, listen to the radio or TV for information or alerts and prepare to go to a higher ground.

Receded Ocean

o Another sign of a tsunami is unexpected and abnormal rise or fall of the ocean water level. The ocean water receding rapidly, exposing the sea floor, coral reefs and fish is a sign that a big wave is on its way. In this case, go to high ground or at least 4 miles inland.

Roaring Sound

o An approaching tsunami creates a loud sound like that of an approaching train or jet aircraft. If you hear this sound without any reason, leave tsunami-prone coastal areas and go to higher ground.

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Read more: What Are the Warning Signs of a Tsunami? | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/about_5399544_warning-signs-tsunami.html#ixzz1day9rC34

Can we predict a tsunami?

Satellite imagery is a precious aid not only for short-term crisis management, but also for scientists eager to obtain precise data on wave formation, power and propagation speed. But in the longer term, will satellites be able to predict the date and time of the next tsunami?

Scientists are already working to determine telltale signs of earthquakes. The Demeter microsatellite developed by CNES may be about to provide some initial answers. Its aim is to observe electromagnetic variations at high altitude. Soviet scientists first found that perturbations in the upper atmosphere preceded earthquakes tens of years ago.

Demeter. Credits : CNES/Ill. D. Ducros

On 26 December 2004, Demeter flew over the epicentre of the quake 9 h before it struck. It recorded variations in the temperature of electrons, but it is too early to say whether this was pure coincidence. Demeter is only just getting up to speed in its 2-year mission, during which it will record hundreds of measurements that should confirm or disprove this hypothesis.

Other monitoring tools are also in operation. In the Pacific Ocean, where 80% of tsunamis occur, an early-warning system is already working. In January 2005, the United Nations decided to set up a similar system in the Indian Ocean, which should be operational by 2006. The Mediterranean and the Caribbean are expected to follow suit in 2007.

Today, millions of people live in high-risk zones around the globe. For example, scientists know that the fault under the Sea of Marmara, in Turkey, will move one day and cause a tsunami that will hit Istanbul, just 20 km away. The risk is there, but seismic prediction capabilities are unfortunately still only at a very early stage.

Now, the important thing is to know what to do when disaster strikes. And here, educating populations is as vital as scientific research.

Fact file

Is France at risk?

The French Antilles are the dependent territories most exposed to earthquake risks, as the quakes in Guadeloupe in 1843 and Martinique in 1839 showed. But what about metropolitan France? Minor tremors regularly occur in the Pyrenees and the Alps. The Mediterranean coast is also at risk, although not from tsunamis of the magnitude that occurred in Asia. However, the power of a tsunami would be increased in the Mediterranean basin, where the shock wave would propagate over a much smaller area.

Catching a Tsunami in the Act

by Daniel Pendick

There is no way to stop a tsunami once set in motion, but there are ways to avoid getting killed by one. The Japanese government has invested billions in coastal defenses against tsunamis -- for example, building concrete sea walls to blunt the impact of the waves and gates that slam shut to protect harbors. But for large tsunamis, the rule is this: You can run, but you can't hide. So tsunami hazard experts are working on ways to make sure people know when a tsunami is coming and where they can run to get out of harm's way.

In Japan and the United States, the foundation of tsunami warnings systems is the seismometer. When officials detect a large, shallow earthquake under the ocean, they issue a warning. But this method is plagued by false alarms, since not every earthquake necessarily triggers a tsunami. For example, since Hawaii's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center was established in 1948, about 75 percent of warnings that resulted in costly evacuations turned out to be false alarms.

Tsunami damage.

After an earthquake off the coast of Peru, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii created a computer model of the tsunami likely to result.

To get around this, tsunami watchdogs have turned to sensors that sit on the seafloor and detect the feathery touch of a tsunami passing overhead. Japan has laid a series of such bottom-pressure sensors along a cable stretching out from its coastline. Now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States is adding bottom sensors to its warning system. When the sensors pick up a tsunami, a buoy anchored nearby relays the message to shore via satellite.

Depending on where the tsunami originates, the sensors could give hours of warning time. (See Tsunami spread animation, below.) They could even help people on the U.S. West Coast after an earthquake on the Cascadia fault, which lies minutes away in tsunami travel time. Though minutes of warning may not be enough in all cases, NOAA's Frank Gonzalez, the scientist heading the sensor project, still thinks the buoys are better than nothing. "A minute or two of warning will get you down the road another half mile and you'll be safe," he says. During the 1993 tsunami attack on Okushiri, Japan, Gonzalez says, "there were a number of incidences in which people were educated enough about tsunamis that they were out the door and up the hill in their pajamas within minutes of the warning, and it saved their lives."

Flash animation, 27K.

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So old-fashioned legwork still is the best defense against a tsunami. But where do you run? Because the height and inland reach of tsunamis can vary so much from one place to another along a coastline, it's not always so obvious. That's why tsunami-plagued regions are preparing for disaster with hazard-mapping programs. Scientists launch computer-simulated tsunamis at a digital representation of a coastline. This enables them to predict when the tsunami waves will hit the coast, how high they will be, and how far inland they will reach. Local officials use the maps to plan evacuation routes and guide zoning decisions. In Oregon, for instance, state law prohibits the construction of "critical facilities" such as hospitals and fire and police stations in mapped tsunami inundation zones.

Article: A Deadly Force | Sidebar One: Catching a Tsunami in the Act | Sidebar Two: Remembrance of Waves Past | ANIMATION

Hell's Crust: Our Everchanging Planet | The Restless Planet: Earthquakes

Out of the Inferno: Volcanoes | Waves of Destruction: Tsunamis

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My City Is Under a Tsunami Advisory. Should I Run for My Life?

No. But you might want to avoid the beach.

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BusinessThe Science Behind a Tsunami

by Nancy Atkinson on March 12, 2011

Model projections of wave heights from the Japan quake on Friday. Image from NOAA. Click image for higher resolution.

The massive magnitude 8.9 earthquake that struck off the east coast Japan’s main island on March 11, 2011 set in motion a fierce tsunami that may have claimed thousands of lives, and sent tsunami warnings all across the Pacific basin, thousands of kilometers away from the quake’s epicenter. How do earthquakes trigger such enormous tsunami events, and how can scientists predict where these massive waves might travel? Universe Today talked with Anne Sheehan, who is a professor of geological sciences at University of Colorado at Boulder, and is also affiliated with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, as well as getting input from David Admiraal, an associate professor of Engineering at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.

Universe Today: How does an earthquake trigger a tsunami?

David Admiraal: Tsunamis are formed when you have an earthquake, and when there is a shift in the bottom of the ocean which causes displacement of the water, and that displacement causes a wave to form.

UT: Does an earthquake need to be a certain magnitude to cause a tsunami?

Anne Sheehan: It depends on where it is more than magnitude. It has to be something that displaces the sea floor – a big earthquake in Colorado will not cause a tsunami, for example. And sometimes there are earthquakes that cause a big tsunami, and the earthquakes aren’t all that big — they just happen to be ones that have moved more seafloor. So, there is not a hard and fast magnitude limit, but it has to take place under the ocean, and has to move the ocean floor vertically – if it moves it side to side it doesn’t matter as much.

UT: How fast do tsunami waves travel?

Sheehan: They travel about 800 km per hour, (500 miles per hour). That seems fast, but compared to a seismic wave it is slow. It is said tsuanmis travel the speed of a jet plane, but it still takes hours and hours to fly from Tokyo to Hawaii, and it took about 7 hours for the tsunami to reach the shores of Hawaii, which is a good thing because that gives people time to evacuate and prepare. But still, that is a fast speed for traveling on the ocean, and it can travel that fast because of the depth of the ocean.

The speed of seismic wave, the P wave (or primary wave, which is the fastest kind of seismic wave) is about 8 km per second, or 30,000 km per hour. So that is quite a bit faster, and it can take just minutes for the seismic wave to travel that same distance.

UT: How are tsunamis different from normal waves we have in the ocean?

Sheehan: They are different because they don’t have a peak and a trough that are fractions of seconds long. With tsunamis , the peak and trough are about 15 minutes long. The size of the wave is huge – even though its amplitude, or its height is not much bigger than what you would find when you are surfing, but there is a whole wall of water that is going out behind it for 15 minutes into the ocean. It might not be perceptible from the surface — there may be just a small rise on the surface. For ships on the oceans, the waves are barely noticeable, but in harbors they can get tossed around quite a bit.

Admiraal: So, in the ocean, you may just have a small rise in the surface, but the rise contains a lot of energy. When it gets to shore, where the ocean is shallower, then the wavelength of the wave decreases a lot because the speed of the wave decreases. And when the front end of the wave slows down when it hits shallower water and the short, the front end is traveling much slower than the back end and so the back end of the wave catches up with the front end and the wave starts to develop a high amplitude. When it reaches the very shallow depths where it breaks, and the back end catches up with the front end, the height can be so high that it can cause damage to anything on the land surface that is next to the ocean.

Sheehan: The difference between tsunami and an ocean wave is that a tsunami is like a whole river that shows up –– a tsunami is like a Class 4 rapids that just shows up and all of a sudden you have a river of water that wasn’t there before.

UT: Why can’t the height of tsunami waves be predicted very well before they reach shore?

Sheehan: While we can predict the speed and the direction pretty well, the height at a given location is can be pretty hard to predict.

There are DART buoys (Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis) in the ocean and on the bottom of the ocean to measure the sea floor pressure, and it measures the tsunamis to see how big they are, and they have models to predict what the amplitudes will be. Ways to improve monitoring would be to have more buoys and more detailed maps of the seas floor, because the patterns of the sea floor topography have a big effect on how the waves might focus. So, that is something that NOAA is actively working on for the US and its territories. If you have a better sea floor map, you have a better estimate of the tsunami model and if you have more data from the waves out in the open ocean, you will have a better height estimate as well.

Also, for predicting an ensuing tsunami, to have data on the earthquake itself — getting its epicenter located and knowing its size as accurately as possible plays a big role, and the USGS plays a big role in getting that information out as quickly as possible.

Link to video of David Admiraal’s explanation of tsunamis.

Nancy Atkinson is Universe Today's Senior Editor. She also is the project manager for the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, works with Astronomy Cast and is host of the NASA Lunar Science Institute podcast

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Rediff.com » News » No one can predict a tsunami: ISRO chief

No one can predict a tsunami: ISRO chief

December 28, 2004 17:06 IST

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Indian Space Research Organisation chairman G Madhavan Nair on Tuesday said that there is no satellite in the world that can predict a tsunami. Similarly, there are no scientific tools to predict an earthquake either.

But satellites can provide images capturing the trail of disaster caused by a tsunami for assessment and fast tracking relief operations.

"We have positioned our remote sensing satellites on the entire affected region and are constantly updating the Crisis Management Group [based in Delhi [ Images ]] with images," Nair told PTI in Bangalore on Tuesday.

• Graph: How quake in Indonesia affected India

Images processed at the National Remote Sensing Agency in Hyderabad would also be distributed to the Union home ministry to help coordinate relief and rescue operations with the state governments.

India [ Images ] has three remote sensing satellites - IRS 1-C, 1-D and Resourcesat-1 and a meteorological satellite Kalpana-1 that assess climatic change.

Incidentally, all three satellites were not over the Indian Ocean on Sunday morning when the tsunami hit the Andaman and Nicobar Islands [ Images ] and the southern Indian coast.

• What is a tsunami?

But ISRO immediately positioned the 5.6 metre high-resolution cameras of Resourcesat and the panchromatic cameras of the IRS satellites to map the disaster, which claimed thousands of lives and destroyed villages along the coast.

• How you can help

© Copyright 2011 PTI. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of PTI content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent.

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• •Run a computer simulation of the effects of earthquakes in various areas of the globe. Run the simulation just after an earthquake with an epicenter in the ocean, in order to predict where the resulting tsunami is likely to occur.

•2

Use a pressure sensor at the bottom of the ocean to determine if a tsunami has started, as well as how large it might be.

•3

Map the locations of the places most prone to tsunamis. Consult the data currently being compiled by satellite along with geological data for maps of the area.

•4

Watch for a retreating shoreline, which is an immediate visual indicator that a tsunami is building. Notice how far the water is receding to gauge how large the tsunami is likely to be.

•5

Pay attention to the earthquake hot zones, such as the, "ring of fire," in the Pacific. Check elevation maps after an ocean earthquake, to predict which areas of the coast are likely to be affected by the tsunami.

•6

Pay attention to the latest earthquake prediction information, such as new uses for satellite data. Use earthquake predictors to predict a tsunami.

Read more: How to Predict a Tsunami | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_2060509_predict-…

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• •Run a computer simulation of the effects of earthquakes in various areas of the globe. Run the simulation just after an earthquake with an epicenter in the ocean, in order to predict where the resulting tsunami is likely to occur.

•2

Use a pressure sensor at the bottom of the ocean to determine if a tsunami has started, as well as how large it might be.

•3

Map the locations of the places most prone to tsunamis. Consult the data currently being compiled by satellite along with geological data for maps of the area.

•4

Watch for a retreating shoreline, which is an immediate visual indicator that a tsunami is building. Notice how far the water is receding to gauge how large the tsunami is likely to be.

•5

Pay attention to the earthquake hot zones, such as the, "ring of fire," in the Pacific. Check elevation maps after an ocean earthquake, to predict which areas of the coast are likely to be affected by the tsunami.

•6

Pay attention to the latest earthquake prediction information, such as new uses for satellite data. Use earthquake predictors to predict a tsunami.

Read more: How to Predict a Tsunami | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_2060509_predict-…

o 1 year ago

o Report Abuse

0% 0 Votes

• by erasmo

Member since:

07 October 2009

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452 (Level 2)

o Add Contact

o Block

i have no idea... but i know how to make 2 easy points!!!

o 1 year ago

o Report Abuse

0% 0 Votes

Discover Questions in Earth Sciences & Geology

• What happens when a lightning strikes? Why is there no fire?

• What type of mineral is this?

• How many kinds of species exist in this planet?

• Which of the following is a zone of divergence? 10 points!?

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Damage from the tsu