Tsunami

In 2020, led by ADN President Dr Hideyuki Shiroshita, 5th-grade pupils from Izumiotsu City published Tsunami DRR newspaper, conducted mock drills for city residents, and developed a tsunami Augmented Reality to indicate tsunami risk.

Magnetic field information could provide earlier disaster warning to at-risk regions, potentially saving lives.

An effort to advance a global network of SMART seafloor cables and develop early warning systems for tsunamis and earthquakes around Vanuatu and New Caledonia is being led by the University of Hawaiʻiat Mānoa.

Scientific modeling demonstrated that for a given earthquake magnitude, if the rupture extends to shallow depth in the less rigid part of the plate, the resulting tsunami is larger than if the rupture is deeper.

The coastal zone is home to over a billion people. Rising sea levels are already impacting coastal residents and aggravating existing coastal hazards, such as flooding during high tides and storm surges.

The Japan earthquake and tsunami prompted extensive damage, including the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

The morning of December 26, 2004 saw the worst disaster in Indonesia’s history. A magnitude (M) 9.1 submarine earthquake occurred along the Indian Ocean subduction zone triggering a massive tsunami that destroyed 800 km of the coastal areas of Aceh Province with inundation observed as far as 6 km inland. Post disaster damage and loss assessment revealed staggering numbers on the calamity that include over 220,000 human fatalities and the destruction of 139,000 houses, 73,869 hectares of agricultural lands, 2,618 kilometers of roads, 3,415 schools, 104,500 small-medium enterprises, 13,828 fishing boats, 119 bridges, 669 government buildings, 517 health facilities, 1,089 worship places, 22 seaports, and 8 airports and airstrips (BRR-Agency for the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Aceh and Nias, 2009). Added to these statistics, more than half a million tsunami survivors were internally displaced and hundreds of thousands more lost their livelihoods.

For the urban coastal city of Hong Kong, typhoons are a regular occurrence from May to October. Consequently, Hong Kong’s infrastructure is designed to cope with the strong winds, floods, and storm surges they bring. Recently, however, the territory experienced two powerful storms in consecutive years. In 2017, Super Typhoon Hato struck the region, and in the following year, the city witnessed Super Typhoon Mangkhut, the strongest typhoon since 1983. But Hong Kong suffered lower economic losses from both storms when compared with the neighboring Guangdong region and the city of Macau, thanks partly to its well-coordinated response and resilient infrastructure.