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Field Survey of the 27 February 2010 Chile Tsunami

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Abstract

On 27 February 2010, a magnitude M w = 8.8 earthquake occurred off the coast of Chile’s Maule region causing substantial damage and loss of life. Ancestral tsunami knowledge from the 1960 event combined with education and evacuation exercises prompted most coastal residents to spontaneously evacuate after the earthquake. Many of the tsunami victims were tourists in coastal campgrounds. The international tsunami survey team (ITST) was deployed within days of the event and surveyed 800 km of coastline from Quintero to Mehuín and the Pacific Islands of Santa María, Mocha, Juan Fernández Archipelago, and Rapa Nui (Easter). The collected survey data include more than 400 tsunami flow depth, runup and coastal uplift measurements. The tsunami peaked with a localized runup of 29 m on a coastal bluff at Constitución. The observed runup distributions exhibit significant variations on local and regional scales. Observations from the 2010 and 1960 Chile tsunamis are compared.

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Acknowledgments

The survey team was supported by the National Science Foundation through the NSF RAPID award CMMI-1034886.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Savannah, GA, 31407, USA

    Hermann M. Fritz

  2. LP4 Associates LLC, Mercer island, WA, USA

    Catherine M. Petroff

  3. Departamento de Obras Civiles, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Valparaíso, Chile

    Patricio A. Catalán

  4. Departamento de Ingeniería Hidráulica y Ambiental Escuela de Ingeniería, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Rodrigo Cienfuegos, Rafael Almar & Juan Carlos Dominguez

  5. School of Ocean Engineering, Universidad de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile

    Patricio Winckler

  6. Department of Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Crete, 73100, Chania, Greece

    Nikos Kalligeris & Athanassios Papadopoulos

  7. Department of Geology and Geophysics, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Robert Weiss

  8. Departamento de Geofísica, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Sergio E. Barrientos, Gianina Meneses & Carolina Valderas-Bermejo

  9. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Carl Ebeling

  10. Departamento de Ingeniería Informática, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de Playa Ancha, Valparaíso, Chile

    Manuel Contreras

  11. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA

    Costas E. Synolakis

  12. Hellenic Center for Marine Research, 19013, Anavyssos, Greece

    Costas E. Synolakis

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  1. Hermann M. Fritz
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  2. Catherine M. Petroff
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  3. Patricio A. Catalán
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  6. Nikos Kalligeris
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  7. Robert Weiss
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  8. Sergio E. Barrientos
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  13. Manuel Contreras
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  14. Rafael Almar
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  15. Juan Carlos Dominguez
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  16. Costas E. Synolakis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hermann M. Fritz.

Appendix Tables

Appendix Tables

See Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1 Tsunami dataset recorded in Chile by the International Tsunami Survey Team (ITST) from 7 March to 23 May 2010
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Table 2 Coastal uplift dataset recorded in Chile by the International Tsunami Survey Team (ITST)
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Fritz, H.M., Petroff, C.M., Catalán, P.A. et al. Field Survey of the 27 February 2010 Chile Tsunami. Pure Appl. Geophys. 168, 1989–2010 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-011-0283-5

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