Nikos Kalligeris

Solomon Islands Tsunami, One Year Later

The geologic and economic effects of the 2 April 2007 Solomon Islands earthquake and tsunami are distinctly visible a little more than a year after the event. Coral reef colonies that were sheared off and uplifted are slowly recovering, and many new earthquake-triggered landslides remain mobile. Large volumes of sediment created by the earthquake and mobilized by the tsunami have been flushed from the lagoons between the reef and shoreline into deeper water, although significant quantities remain on land. Sediment from the lagoons covers piles of shattered coral that the tsunami moved from the lagoons to the base of channels in the barrier reef. These shattered corals have a higher chance of preservation as paleotsunami deposits than the material deposited on land.

Tsunami currents in ports.

Tsunami-induced currents present an obvious hazard to maritime activities and ports in particular. The historical record is replete with accounts from ship captains and harbour masters describing their fateful encounters with currents and surges caused by these destructive waves. Despite the well-known hazard, only since the trans-oceanic tsunamis of the early twenty-first century (2004, 2010 and 2011) have coastal and port engineering practitioners begun to develop port-specific warning and response products that accurately assess the effects of tsunami-induced currents in addition to overland flooding and inundation. The hazard from strong currents induced by far-field tsunami remains an underappreciated risk in the port and maritime community. In this paper, we will discuss the history of tsunami current observations in ports, look into the current state of the art in port tsunami hazard assessment and discuss future research trends.

New Maps of California to Improve Tsunami Preparedness

~ 6.6) the next day. Although no lives were lost in these temblors, 98 peo-ple were injured. These earthquakes heavily damaged older structures within this sparsely populated, mountainous region, causing more than US

Lagrangian flow measurements and observations of the 2015 Chilean tsunami in Ventura, CA

66 million in losses.Approximately 20 minutes after the fi rst earthquake, tide gauge stations in nearby Crescent City reported a surge—a tsunami with maximum wave heights (from trough to crest) of 1.1 meters. The tsunami hit Cres-cent City and Eureka at low tide. Fortunately, no damages occurred to city or harbor facil-ities—had this happened during high tide, it may have been a different story [

Source Models and Near-Field Impact of the 1 April 2007 Solomon Islands Tsunami

Tsunami-induced coastal currents are spectacular examples of nonlinear and chaotic phenomena. Due to their long periods, tsunamis transport substantial energy into coastal waters, and as this energy interacts with the ubiquitous irregularity of bathymetry, shear and turbulent features appear. The oscillatory character of a tsunami wave train leads to flow reversals, which in principle can spawn persistent turbulent coherent structures (e.g., large vortices or “whirlpools”) that can dominate damage and transport potential. However, no quantitative measurements exist to provide physical insight into this kind of turbulent variability, and no motion recordings are available to help elucidate how these vortical structures evolve and terminate. We report our measurements of currents in Ventura Harbor, California, generated by the 2015 Chilean M8.3 earthquake. We measured surface velocities using GPS drifters and image sequences of surface tracers deployed at a channel bifurcation, as the event unfolded. From the maps of the flow field, we find that a tsunami with a near-shore amplitude of 30 cm at 6 m depth produced unexpectedly large currents up to 1.5 m/s, which is a fourfold increase over what simple linear scaling would suggest. Coherent turbulent structures appear throughout the event, across a wide range of scales, often generating the greatest local currents.

Field Survey of the 27 February 2010 Chile Tsunami

Within weeks of the Solomon Islands earthquake of 1 April 2007, international tsunami survey teams discovered important biomarkers of crust rupture and tsunami heights along the islands’ coastlines. Deep-ocean tsunameters recorded the tsunami waves of this event, enabling a real-time inversion of the tsunami source and model evaluation of near-field tsunami impact. The survey measurements provide valuable datasets for further confirmation of the tsunami source of the 1 April 2007 Solomon earthquake. These survey results also aided investigation of the correlation between sources determined by use of tsunameter records and those derived from seismometer records or crust-rupture measurements. In this study, to assess the near-field tsunami impact, we developed tsunami inundation models for the Solomon Islands, including tsunami waveforms, co-seismic land-level changes, and tsunami height distributions on individual islands. Compared with seismic-derived tsunami sources, modeling results based on the tsunameter-derived tsunami sources were a good match with field survey measurements. These results highlight the accuracy and efficiency of the tsunameter-derived tsunami source in modeling the near-field tsunami impact along a complex archipelago. We show that the source models, although derived by use of different methods, are all suited to initiation of inundation models developed for Solomon Islands. As these source models become available in real time or near real time, they can be implemented immediately in the inundation models to provide rapid guidance on tsunami hazard assessment, focused search and rescue operations, and post-event recovery and reconstruction.