|
 NEWSPAPER AND MAGAZINE STORIES
CALENDAR OF UPCOMING CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS
Dec 16, 2005 - The Scientific American published in its January issue and extensive article on the 2004 meagatsunami, The wave of change. The article may be available to subscribers at www.scientificamerican.com
Dec 13, 2005 - The Governor's Seismic Safety Commission has released its report on tsunami preparedness in the State of California. The report identifies several shortcoming in emergency preparedness, particularly for the port facilities. It is important to note that the Governor's Office of Emergency Services is continuing its effort to develop inundation maps at high resolution from multiple tsunami events for California, as the State budget permits. It is expected that the next post-Sumatra release of inundation maps will be more hazard specific and will allow for easier implementation of tsunami warnings. Download the report here.
Dec 6, 2005 - Professor EMile Okal estimates that 1/24,000 people in the world died in the 26-December-2004 megatsunami, giving the megatsunami the unfortunate distinction of the worst natural hazard in the past two centuries in terms of numbers of deaths normalized by the population of the world.
Dec 6, 2005 - During the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, certain projections about a possible rupture of the Cascadia Subduction Zone were presented by a group which has never modeled tsunamis of such scales before. USGS's Dr. Brian Atwater noted that these projections of 40m runup were about four times higher than earlier projections that corresponded to findings from sedimentologic studies. These new projections led some to question if the impact of a Cascadia event along the West Coast of the US is adequately understood and accounted in inundation maps. The TRC notes that these high estimates have not been validated through the customary scientific peer review process, and probably relied on source models that might not be entirely realistic, or used unvalidated models. There have been extensive studies on Cascadia already using validated models, and the new findings are neither new nor findings. The same group presented projections for southern Sumatra, again with exaggerated fault lengths that do not reflect geophysical reality. While the southern Sumatra segment of the Sumatran Subduction Zone is not as well understood as Cascadia, the TRC is of the same opinion as their findings on Cascadia. The TRC notes that inundation maps are urgently needed in Southern Sumatra to allow emergency planning for a repeat of the 1833 earthquake, but these maps need to be based on the best available science for the sake of the people at risk.
The USGS had a special site on Cascadia. The complete USGS report of Dr. Eric Geist from where this graphic is extracted is here.
Dec 14-16, 2005 - Second Session of the IOC Intergovernmental Coordination Group for the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System (Hyderabad, India, 14-16 December 2005)
Nov 21, 2005 - UNESCO holds meeting in Rome for the Intergovernmental Coordination Group for the Tsunami Early Warning and Mitigation System in the North Eastern Atlantic
Oct 26-27 - Special meeting of the Royal Society on Extreme Natural Hazards
Sept 9, 2005 - Dr. Vasily Titov and others from the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory published their findings on the Global Reach of the 26-December-2005 tsunami in SCIENCE, please download directly from the Science site www.sciencemag.org. it is the most comprehensive article on the megatsunami hydrodynamics published since 26 December 2004. The figure below is from Titov et al, 2005. (click image for a larger view).
PREVIOUS NEWS >>
 |