Abstract
The run-up catalogs of two global tsunami databases maintained by the NCEI/WDC NOAA and NTL/ICMMG SD RAS are examined to compile the list of annual maximum runups observed or measured in the oceanic, marine and inland basins during the last 120 years (from 1900 to 2019). All the retrieved annual maximum runups were divided into four groups according to four main types of tsunami sources (seismogenic, landslide-generated, volcanic, and meteorological). Their distribution over the type of sources shows that of the 120 maximum runups only 78 (65%) resulted from seismogenic sources, while the remaining 42 runups were divided between landslide-generated (19%), volcanic (8%), and meteorological (7.5%) sources. The analysis of geographical distribution of source locations demonstrates that tsunamis are not exclusively a marine hazard—over 15% of all maximum runups were observed in coastal and inland water basins (narrow bays, fiords, lakes, and rivers). Temporal distribution of the collected runups shows that annual occurrence of large tsunamis was more or less stable throughout the twentieth century and only demonstrates some increase during the last 27 years (since 1992) when the practice of post-event surveys of all damaging tsunamis was implemented. This paper also outlines the existing problems with data compilation, cataloguing, and distribution, and discusses incompleteness of runup and wave-form data for a considerable number of non-damaging tsunamis, even those resulting from the strong (magnitude higher than 7.5) submarine earthquakes.
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Acknowledgements
Figures in this paper were drawn using built-in options of the PDM/TSU graphic shell (PDM/TSU 2020) developed in the NTL/ICMMG SD RAS as supporting software for the tsunami database. The author wishes to thank Emile Okal and Fred Stephenson for careful reading of the manuscript and making numerous suggestions for its improvement as well as Tamara Kalashnikova and Katia Lyskovskaya for assistance in data processing and figure drawing. The results presented in this paper were supported by the RAS Project no. 0315-2019-0005.
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Gusiakov, V.K. Global Occurrence of Large Tsunamis and Tsunami-like Waves Within the Last 120 years (1900–2019). Pure Appl. Geophys. 177, 1261–1266 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-020-02437-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-020-02437-9