{"id":37177,"date":"2025-07-31T15:44:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T15:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/37177\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T15:44:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T15:44:07","slug":"why-did-such-a-powerful-earthquake-and-tsunami-cause-so-little-damage-earthquakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/37177\/","title":{"rendered":"Why did such a powerful earthquake and tsunami cause so little damage? | Earthquakes"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday, one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded<\/a> hit a sparsely populated region in far-east Russia.<\/p>\n

It triggered a tsunami<\/a> that started crossing the ocean at hundreds of miles an hour. What followed was a race against time: early-warning systems went into alert mode as waves fanned out towards the coastlines of Japan, Hawaii and the US west coast.<\/p>\n

The damage appears to have been minor so far and this is, in part, thanks to a global and highly successful disaster response effort. More than 3 million people were successfully told to evacuate their homes.<\/p>\n

At the centre of this remarkable response was the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre<\/a> (PTWC), based in Hawaii. Founded in 1949, \u200bit was monitoring tsunamis across the entire ocean by the 1960s. A small team of experts identified the size and depth of the earthquake, and a tsunami warning was triggered straight away. The whole thing worked like clockwork \u2013 their speed and accuracy may have saved thousands of lives, with temporary evacuees now allowed to return home<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But this type of work could be under threat. The PTWC is part of a US government agency that has faced cuts from the Trump administration.<\/p>\n

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake hit off Russia\u2019s Kamchatka peninsula on Wednesday morning. The rupture happened along hundreds of miles of a fault line where the Pacific plate is sinking below the North American plate. This is one of the largest faults on Earth \u2013 it is called a megathrust fault \u2013 and parts of it are underwater, which means there is always a tsunami risk.<\/p>\n

The earthquake was 30 miles (47km) beneath sea level and sent shock waves at a range of 200 miles. Tsunamis<\/a> travel across the ocean at about 500mph, the speed of a jumbo jet, so some communities had just few minutes\u2019 warning \u2013 while those on the other side of the ocean had a few hours. Unlike in the movies, when it is typically one massive wave, tsunamis are often several waves that will continue to travel around the world for days.<\/p>\n

Huge ash columns erupted from the Klyuchevskoy volcano on Wednesday. Photograph: Yuri Demyanchuk\/APWhat has the damage been and where?<\/p>\n

The epicentre was near the Russian city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, which has a population of 180,000 people. Residents fled inland as ports flooded, while 200 miles north, the Klyuchevskoy volcano erupted, with lava descending its western slope.<\/p>\n

Maximum tsunami wave heights of 4 metres (13ft) were observed in Kamchatka. Some buildings on the coastal area of Severo-Kurilsk in Russia were swept away, according to local officials. The Kremlin has said alert systems \u201cworked well\u201d in the earthquake response and there were no casualties.<\/p>\n

The tsunami prompted warnings and evacuations across the Pacific, including in Japan, the US west coast, Hawaii, Canada, Chile, Ecuador and New Zealand. Nevertheless, the height of the waves turned out to be lower than initially feared. In Hawaii the highest recorded waves reached 1.8 metres<\/a>, in California there were surges of just over a metre, and in Japan waves remained under half a metre.<\/p>\n

How good was the warning system?<\/p>\n

Local authorities were clear about how to evacuate and gave specific locations across more than a dozen nations.<\/p>\n

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A tsunami alert on a mobile photo in Honolulu. Photograph: Jennifer Sinco Kelleher\/AP<\/p>\n

In Hawaii<\/a>, for example, tsunami warning sirens blared. Evacuations were ordered for some coastal areas as the Honolulu department of emergency management announced: \u201cTake action. Destructive tsunami waves expected.\u201d People received alerts on their phones. All islands activated emergency operating centres, shelters opened, and people in coastal areas were told to go to higher ground.<\/p>\n

Similar warnings were issued elsewhere. In Japan<\/a>, almost 2 million people had been ordered to higher ground. Local media reported one fatality of a woman killed while driving her car off a cliff as she tried to escape. In Chile, authorities conducted what the interior ministry said was \u201cperhaps the most massive evacuation ever carried out in our country\u201d involving 1.4 million people.<\/p>\n

Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London, says: \u201cIt looks like it\u2019s been very effective. People had that long-term education, and that long-term readiness to know what to do.\u201d He estimates that this preparedness saved thousands of lives. At this time of year there is a lot of tourist activity along many Pacific coastlines, and visitors are often unfamiliar with local warning systems or evacuation zones. This can make evacuations more challenging.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt appears from places where the tsunami wave has hit, numerous lives were saved by drawing on that past experience,\u201d says Kelman, notably the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which killed more than 200,000 people. At the time there was no regional tsunami early warning system in place, and the Indian Ocean was not considered a high-risk area. Some warnings were sent by fax and email, and did not reach people in time.<\/p>\n

The 2004 tsunami was also significantly more severe \u2013 some waves exceeded 30 metres in height; whereas so far waves from this latest tsunami appear to have reached a maximum of 5 metres in Russia, says Kelman. In most places, waves were less than a metre high, and in many places effects were negligible so the disaster that was anticipated did not arrive. This is another important factor in why damage has been limited.<\/p>\n

What improvements can be made?<\/p>\n

Several international centres send out automatic messages for earthquakes, depending on the location. The Indian Ocean tsunami warning system<\/a> was set up after 2004. Kelman says: \u201cIt was never done before then because it was always too expensive, there were always other priorities, but suddenly it became a priority \u2026 It has been tested several times with mixed results, so we have to improve it.\u201d There is no effective equivalent for the Atlantic Ocean.<\/p>\n

The main centre to identify this earthquake was the PTWC. \u201cThey were on it right away,\u201d says Kelman. \u201cKnowing the size of the earthquake and the depth of the earthquake and the type of the earthquake meant that there was a significant chance of a major tsunami. They issued tsunami warnings and got the messages out there, which were then disseminated by national governments and local authorities.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, the PTWC sits within a US government agency targeted by Elon Musk-led cuts earlier this year. Kelman says this tsunami shows how needed it is. He says: \u201cWe would hope that if the cuts did affect them, they will be reversed and that the people who have saved lives today will also get more support for appropriate resources.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt appears that they were nonetheless exceptionally effective, and we owe them so many thanks for issuing appropriate messages and saving many lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Wednesday, one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded hit a sparsely populated region in far-east Russia.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-37177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}