There’s a potential chance that a tsunami could hit the island of Hawaii in the next 50 years according to researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
The slim but possible chance of an 9.0 magnitude earthquake occurring in the Aleutian Islands could produce the possibility of a tsunami and has been predicted using a newly designed computer model according to UPI.
The study published this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research Solid Earth, isn’t to scare people as they claim there is only a 9 percent chance this would happen and in the event, residents would have around 4 hours to evacuate to safety. However, the authors of the study can’t ignore that the possibility of an earthquake of this magnitude could pose a threat.
Since Hawaii has no real recent history of this kind of event, the researchers involved in the study used fault system measurements alongside Bayesian probability models for the predictions. They then tested them against past historic occurrences including ancient evidence of tsunami events found in coastal sediments and volcanic records.
Lead author and geophysicist at the UHM School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, Rhett Butler states, “Having no recorded history of mega tsunamis in Hawaii, and given the tsunami threat to Hawaii, we devised a model for Magnitude 9 earthquake rates following up on the insightful work of David Burbidge and others.”
As Butler says, Hawaii has no current recorded history of huge tsunamis but because of where the island is situated, it could be vulnerable to earthquakes around the area and beyond.
The team are now using the computer model to work on predicting smaller earthquakes.