The report makes a review of the tsunami hazards over the last 400 years and highlights "seismic gaps" or locations in the Pacific region where the tsunami threat might have been overlooked, due to long periods of seismic inactivity.
Professor Fumihiko Imamura from the International Research Institute of Disaster Science, Tohoku University (Japan), lead author of the academic paper, said: "We have conducted a global tsunami hazard assessment for low tsunami risk areas, based on a 400-year database which allows insight into past and potential future tsunamis based on seismic gaps which are earthquake faults active in the past but now quiet."
"Our research focused on the Pacific and we have simulated 18 possible major events which demonstrate the tsunami risk for the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Philippines, New Zealand, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia."
"In the case of New Zealand, we have demonstrated that it is potentially vulnerable to locally generated tsunamis despite past records being exclusively limited to tsunamis generated from distant locations such as Chile."
"Memories of tsunami events fade quickly but damaging tsunamis of over two meters have been seen everywhere along the Pacific Rim separately from the two most destructive tsunamis of recent times, the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 and the Great East Japan Tsunami in 2011."
The academic paper "A Global Assessment of Historical and Future Tsunami Hazards Based on Seismic Records over the Last 400 Years and Estimated Seismic Gaps" was produced for this year's World Tsunami Awareness Day,on November 5, and is available here.
Source: United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR)
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