Abstract
The island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, is located in a complex and tectonically active region, and has experienced tsunamis in the past. One of the major earthquake and tsunami events was the 23 February 1969 event that struck the Majene region in western Sulawesi Island. Interpretation of the historical accounts revealed that the Mw 7.0 earthquake generated strong intensity up to VIII on the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale. The earthquake was followed by an unusually high tsunami of 4 m that rapidly decayed within 25 km from the highest observation site. Hypocentre and earthquake mechanism analyses confirmed that it was an inland earthquake with a thrust mechanism. Ground motion modelling is able to reproduce the earthquake intensity but earthquake scenarios are unable to reconstruct the tsunami observations. A plausible solution to explain the tsunami report is from a combined scenario of an earthquake and a submarine mass failure of \(0.5~\hbox {km}^3\).
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Data Availability Statement
\(V_s30\) dataset is available on https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303989870_vs30_Indonesia. Earthquake data catalogue including arrival times and first-motion polarities are available from https://www.isc.ac.uk/isc-ehb/ (last accessed April 2021). The national bathymetry (BATNAS) and coastal contours bathymetry (Lembar Pantai Indonesia) are freely provided by the Government of Indonesia on https://tanahair.indonesia.go.id/portal-web and https://portal.ina-sdi.or.id/downloadaoi, respectively (last accessed 22 March 2021).
Code Availability
Figures were prepared using Quantum GIS, Generic Mapping Tools, and Matplotlib. We used the Scientific Colourmaps (Cramerri et al., 2021) which available on https://www.fabiocrameri.ch/colourmaps/ (last accessed 22 March 2021). The JAGURS code for tsunamigenic earthquake modelling is available on https://github.com/jagurs-admin/jagurs. The Open Quake software is available on https://github.com/gem/oq-engine.
Notes
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Mohammad Heidarzadeh from Brunel University London, UK, for valuable discussion that significantly improved the initial manuscript. Tsunami simulations were performed on the Young HPC https://www.rc.ucl.ac.uk/docs/Clusters/Young/ under Brunel University London allocation grant.
Funding
IRP was supported by the Royal Society, United Kingdom (CHL\(\backslash\)R1\(\backslash\)180173) during his fellowship at Brunel University London (January 2020 - July 2021).
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All authors = prepared manuscript; IRP = lead author, historical accounts, tsunami modelling; AC = tectonic setting, historical accounts, ground motion modelling; HA = earthquake analysis; TB and KI = developed JAGURS code for earthquake and landslide modelling. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Pranantyo, I.R., Cipta, A., Shiddiqi, H.A. et al. Source Reconstruction of the 1969 Western Sulawesi, Indonesia, Earthquake and Tsunami. Pure Appl. Geophys. 180, 1765–1783 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-022-03064-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-022-03064-2