Tsunami research is necessary by Barbora Misakova

When one of the most devastating tsunamis hit Hawaii in 2004 and killed more than 200,000 people, the world authorities realized the world is faced with another serious problem. A huge tsunami got to the list of top 5 natural disaster killers of the world. Some scientists are saying there is less need for additional measuring equipment and computational costs should be increased instead. According to their opinion, there are enough materials that should be studied and computers are necessary for it. As they say, a rigorous examination of long-standing assumptions and generation of tsunami models could be useful for estimating the strength and impact of tsunamis in the futur! e. A main man of this idea is Gerard Fryer a geophysicist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, who used to work as a professor at the University of Hawaii. When he heard about Chile’s earthquake he was expecting that destructive tsunami would hit Hawaii, but to his surprise, it didn’t happen. Now they have to figure out why it didn’t. One Fryer’s assumption is that Chilean quake occurred in deeper waters than actually happened. That would mean that more displaced water results in a larger tsunami. Second assumption says that tsunami waves travel at about the same speed – wave speed and also intervals between waves can affect how tsunamis interact with coastal zones. However current models do not sufficiently take intervals into account and they also did not calculate “dispersion” of the waves which reduces the strength of tsunami waves.

related story (sgx16629): http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100302/ap_on_sc/us_tsunami_asse...

by Barbora Misakova for SigEx Ventures (http://sigexventures.com)

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