Seismic Zone Off Alaska Could Trigger Massive Earthquake and Tsunami

[Judi Lynn]

By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor | August 2, 2017 07:05am ET


A so-called seismic zone off the coast of Alaska could trigger deadly tsunamis like the one that caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011, a new study finds.

Identifying other seismic zones — a region high in seismic activity such as tremors and earthquakes — with these features could help researchers identify areas that could produce catastrophic waves, the scientists added.

Tsunamis are monster waves that can grow to be more than 100 feet (30 meters) high. They are typically caused by earthquakes; for example, the 2004 Banda Aceh earthquake and tsunami killed about 250,000 people in Indonesia, and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that struck offshore Japan killed about 20,000 people and triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster. [Waves of Destruction: History's Biggest Tsunamis]

Major tsunamis often result at the shallow portions of subduction zones, the areas where one of the tectonic plates that make up Earth's surface dives below another. These crash zones are dangerously active, and these tectonic interactions can cause the world's biggest earthquakes and worst tsunamis.

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[Warpy]

1. It did in 1964

when there was a 9.2 quake. It's perfectly reasonable to think it could happen again.

The coastal population was lower than it is now, so the death toll was 139, 106 from the tsunami, 18 of those in Oregon and California.

It's not a question of if it will happen, it's only a question of when it will happen because it will.

[Cold War Spook]

3. In Monterey CA

I was stationed at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey CA when the earthquake hit Alaska. The surfers were on their boards waiting for the first waves. When they saw them, I have never seen surfers paddling into shore that fast before or since. No one stayed out to catch those waves, even the 8-10 foot ones.

[Warpy]

4. Great memory

I'd had a friend who'd moved to Anchorage the previous year. She sent me snapshots, one showing a commercial street with one side of the street's shops sunk down so their roofs were just above the level of the pavement.

I was very impressed, having spent most of my growing up years in various places in the seismically boring part of the eastern US.

[Brother Buzz]

5. They surf at midnight in Monterey?

COWABUNGA, dude!

[NNadir]

2. How is that it is "like the one that caused Fukushima" and not like the one that caused...

...collapsing buildings and drownings in a Japanese coastal city?

Which killed more people, radiation from the reactors or buildings collapsing?

How many people died in 2011 from the radiation exactly? How is it that the lives of one person, if there is such a person, is worthy of all kinds of angst and the death of 20,000 from, um, seawater is just a ho hum "couldn't give a shit" experience?

In the period between 2000 and 2015 over a quarter of a million people died from living in coastal cities because of Tsunamis.

Which generates more comment on the internet, the quarter of a million people who died in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami or Fukushima?

I would submit, with some degree of moral certainty, that rising seas are a far larger problem than the big, big, big, big hullabaloo about "nuclear safety" and that in fact, the big, big, big, big hullabaloo about nuclear power is more dangerous than nuclear power itself, since nuclear energy saves lives and ignorance framed as selective attention costs lives.

The fact that "Fukushima" has become a scare term, and seawater isn't is a big, big, big part of the reason that future generations will suffer unparalleled tragedy because we, their forbears for better or worse were so damned incredibly ignorant.

One thousand Fukushimas wouldn't kill as many people as will die this year because of air pollution, and in fact, 100 of them wouldn't kill as many people as died from tsunamis this century, even before we're 20% through it.