Shorelines Could Help Forecast Tsunami Floods

From Yahoo! News:

Predicting flooding from tsunamis saves lives. After the Tohoku earthquake two years ago, alerts issued in advance of the monster waves saved thousands of people in Japan and other countries circling the Pacific Ocean.

But for many in Japan, the forecasts failed. Models could not predict how far inland the tsunami would rush, leading to thousands of deaths.

A new study suggests the devastating effects were heavily dependent on more than just the enormous size of the magnitude-9.0 earthquake that triggered the tsunami. The distance of the coast from the point where the earthquake ruptured also played a role. At just the right spacing from a coastline, a tsunami wave can focus its energy at the coast, sweeping farther inland than current models predict, researchers found.

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