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Observations and Numerical Modeling of the 2012 Haida Gwaii Tsunami off the Coast of British Columbia

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Abstract

A major (M w 7.7) earthquake occurred on October 28, 2012 along the Queen Charlotte Fault Zone off the west coast of Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands). The earthquake was the second strongest instrumentally recorded earthquake in Canadian history and generated the largest local tsunami ever recorded on the coast of British Columbia. A field survey on the Pacific side of Haida Gwaii revealed maximum runup heights of up to 7.6 m at sites sheltered from storm waves and 13 m in a small inlet that is less sheltered from storms (Leonard and Bednarski 2014). The tsunami was recorded by tide gauges along the coast of British Columbia, by open-ocean bottom pressure sensors of the NEPTUNE facility at Ocean Networks Canada’s cabled observatory located seaward of southwestern Vancouver Island, and by several DART stations located in the northeast Pacific. The tsunami observations, in combination with rigorous numerical modeling, enabled us to determine the physical properties of this event and to correct the location of the tsunami source with respect to the initial geophysical estimates. The initial model results were used to specify sites of particular interest for post-tsunami field surveys on the coast of Moresby Island (Haida Gwaii), while field survey observations (Leonard and Bednarski 2014) were used, in turn, to verify the numerical simulations based on the corrected source region.

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Notes

  1. DART deep-ocean assessment and reporting of tsunamis.

  2. This uncharted inlet has no official name. It was called Davidson Inlet by Leonard and Bednarski (2014). An alternative name, Seaquake Inlet, was proposed by the Captain of the CCGS Bartlett, which carried out a custom bathymetric survey in this inlet on August 8, 2013. Given the observed large runup, the latter name may be quite appropriate.

  3. This large value is still under discussion as it was obtained on the coast of a partly exposed inlet which may have been affected by the destructive storm one week after the tsunami event. The maximum tsunami runup found by Leonard and Bednarski (2014) for the sheltered coastal areas was 7.6 m.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Lucinda Leonard and Jan Bednarski of the Pacific Geosciences Centre, Natural Resources Canada, for providing us with the latest results from their post-tsunami surveys; Elena Suleimani of the University of Alaska Fairbanks for her valuable comments; and to Peter Wills and personnel of the Canadian Hydrographic Service (CHS) for supplying us with the digital bathymetric data used to construct the tsunami model grids. We thank Denny Sinnott (CHS) for the BC coastal sea level data used in this study. We also thank Yong Wei of the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, WA, and an anonymous reviewer for their useful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Ocean Sciences Division, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Institute of Ocean Sciences, 9860 West Saanich Road, Sidney, BC, V8L 4B2, Canada

    Isaac V. Fine, Josef Y. Cherniawsky, Richard E. Thomson, Alexander B. Rabinovich & Maxim V. Krassovski

  2. Russian Academy of Sciences, P. P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, 36 Nakhimovsky Prosp, Moscow, 117997, Russia

    Alexander B. Rabinovich

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  1. Isaac V. Fine
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  2. Josef Y. Cherniawsky
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Correspondence to Josef Y. Cherniawsky.

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Fine, I.V., Cherniawsky, J.Y., Thomson, R.E. et al. Observations and Numerical Modeling of the 2012 Haida Gwaii Tsunami off the Coast of British Columbia. Pure Appl. Geophys. 172, 699–718 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-014-1012-7

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