In this paper we show that shallow, elongated parts in a sloping bottom toward the coast will act as a waveguide and lead to large enhanced wave amplification for tsunami waves. Since this is even the case for narrow shallow regions, near-coast tsunami waveguiding may contribute to an explanation that tsunami heights and coastal effects as observed in reality show such high variability along th...

Tsunami observations play an important role in resolving offshore earthquake slip distributions. Non-dispersive models are often used with an initial static sea-surface pulse derived from seafloor deformation in computation of tsunami Green's functions. We compare this conventional approach with more advanced techniques, which use Green's functions computed by a dispersive model with an initial...

The problem of generation and propagation of tsunami waves is mainly focused on plane beach, there are very few analytical works where wave generation is considered on non-uniformly sloping beach and as a result those works might have failed to capture important facts which are influenced by bottom-slope of the beach. Some researchers provided solution to the forced long linear waves but on a b...

The risk of large, devastating tsunamis in the South China Sea and its surrounding coastal region is commonly underestimated or unrecognized due to the difficulty of differentiating tsunami from storm deposits. As a consequence, few convincing records have documented tsunami deposits in this region. Here we report preliminary evidence from Xisha Islands in the South China Sea for a large tsunam...

Tsunami-induced currents present an obvious hazard to maritime activities and ports in particular. The historical record is replete with accounts from ship captains and harbour masters describing their fateful encounters with currents and surges caused by these destructive waves. Despite the well-known hazard, only since the trans-oceanic tsunamis of the early twenty-first century (2004, 2010 a...

Non-breaking tsunami waves run-up on steep slopes can cause severe damages to coastal structures. The estimation of the wave run-up rate caused by tsunami waves are important to understand the performance and safety issues of the breakwater in practice. In this paper, an Incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method (ISPH) method was utilized for the 2DV numerical modeling of nonli...

A series of experiments has been carried out at the Tsunami Wave Basin (TWB) at Oregon State University (OSU) to determine the effect of tsunami bores on coastal and nearshore structures, especially buildings and bridges. The TWB is equipped with a piston-type wavemaker capable of generating clean solitary waves. The facility was used to model tsunami bores breaking over coastal reefs and their...

In this paper, we use the approximation of shallow water waves (Margaritondo 2005 Eur. J. Phys. 26 401) to understand the behavior of a tsunami in a variable depth. We deduce the shallow water wave equation and the continuity equation that must be satisfied when a wave encounters a discontinuity in the sea depth. A short explanation about how the tsunami hit the west coast of India is given bas...

The 1946 Aleutian earthquake was a typical tsunami earthquake which generated abnormally larger tsunami than expected from its seismic waves. Previously, Johnson and Satake (1997) estimated the fault model of this earthquake using the tsunami waveforms observed at tide gauges. However, they did not model the second pulse of the tsunami at Honolulu although that was much larger than the first pu...

We investigate the generation, propagation, and probabilistic hazard of tsunami spawned by oceanic asteroid impacts. The process first links the depth and diameter of parabolic impact cavities to asteroid density, radius, and impact velocity by means of elementary energy arguments and crater scaling rules. Then, linear tsunami theory illustrates how these transient cavities evolve into vertical...