|
|
PHOTOGRAPH BY PAULA BRONSTEIN, GETTY IMAGES
|
|
By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE Executive Editor
In the September 1896 issue of National Geographic magazine, writer Eliza Scidmore recounts what happened when a “great earthquake wave” struck that June in Japan. She informed readers that the Japanese word for this type of wave is a tsunami—kicking off widespread adoption of the term for ocean waves created when quakes displace water, linguist Ben Zimmer tells NPR.
Japan has certainly seen its share of powerful earthquakes and accompanying tsunamis, so it makes sense the world would adopt the Japanese term for the phenomenon. According to the UN’s International Tsunami Information Center, most tsunamis happen in the Pacific Ocean, where conditions are ripe for strong, shallow quakes to send devastating waves crashing ashore. But don’t let the etymology fool you: Tsunamis can happen all over the world if the geologic conditions are right. And as scientists recently discovered, some earthquakes can unexpectedly generate tsunamis powerful enough to be felt in multiple oceans.
That’s what happened last August, when a quake in the remote South Sandwich Islands was followed by a tsunami recorded along the coasts of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. “Although the swell wasn’t destructive, it was the first since the catastrophic tsunami of 2004 to be recorded in three different oceans,” Robin George Andrews reports. The South Sandwich Islands are prone to quakes, but by all accounts, this one was too deep to have made the ocean slosh so dramatically, creating a conundrum for geologists.
|
|
|
|
