Authors / CoAuthors
Drummond, B. | Dhu, T.
Abstract
Most tsunami are caused by earthquakes that displace the water column by faulting the sea bottom or causing submarine landslides. Australia is surrounded by 8,000 km of active, earthquake-prone, plate margins. In Western Australia tsunami hazard is highest in the northwest facing the subduction zones of the Indonesian arc. Tsunami hazard along the eastern coast comes from subduction zones from the Solomon Islands in the northeast to the Puysegur Trench south of New Zealand. Images of the tsunami of 26 December 2004 impacting Thailand showed tsunami several metres high inundating large sections of shore line. Australia is much farther from the tsunami sources, and is more likely to face tsunami with smaller heights regionally but possibly increasing unpredictably to much larger heights locally. The Australian Government has funded the establishment of the Australian Tsunami Warning System (ATWS). End-to-end warning systems consider the development of mitigation strategies, monitoring for events, issuing warnings, and response and recovery phases after the event. The geosciences play important roles in several of these steps. Hazard mapping requires the study of the earthquake source regions (fault geometry, maximum likely earthquake magnitude and its probability, and estimates of the resulting tsunami height and direction). The development of mitigation strategies requires estimating the propagation of tsunami across the deep ocean, shoaling in the shallow waters near the shore line, the inundation of the land and the impact on people and infrastructure. The detection of earthquakes requires access to national and international seismograph networks that work interoperably in near-real-time, and algorithms for the rapid automatic determination of their locations (including depth), magnitudes and focal mechanisms. In cases where there are no sea level gauges between the source and coastline, the warning systems rely entirely on earthquake parameters. Published with the permission of the CEO of Geoscience Australia.
Product Type
nonGeographicDataset
eCat Id
65585
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Cnr Jerrabomberra Ave and Hindmarsh Dr GPO Box 378
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Keywords
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- External PublicationAbstract
- ( Theme )
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- risk assessment
- ( Theme )
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- tsunamis
- Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)
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- Earth Sciences
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- Published_Internal
Publication Date
2008-01-01T00:00:00
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geoscientificInformation
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[-90.0, 0.0, 90.0, 180.0]
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