It was a through-the-looking-glass moment for Chris Goldfinger, sitting in a meeting about Sumatran earthquakes on a recent Friday afternoon in Chiba, Japan, on the outskirts of Tokyo. The floor started heaving as if a switch flipped. That terrible shaking turned out to be the magnitude 9.0 Sendai temblor, tsunami-maker and devastator.

"We felt pretty safe," says Goldfinger, director of Oregon State University's Active Tectonics and Seafloor Mapping Lab, "but, oddly, still had time to run outside and ride through four or five minutes of mainshock. That was a very long time for the Earth to feel like the ocean."

At that point the ocean itself was already rearing up from its cracked floor to drown the coast 290 kilometers to the northeast. One month later, Japan is still in crisis.

Even so, one finer point in the wake of that horrible day will be what science can do to improve the odds—to give better, faster tsunami warnings. For Goldfinger—still rattled in Chiba—warning systems are a bill of goods, a chimera. "The earthquake is the warning," he says, describing a "near-field" event like Sendai where the temblor is very close to the coast. "Warning systems have been greatly oversold by those who created them."

One such creator, physicist Jörn Lauterjung, disagrees and draws a different lesson. Japan has decades of planning experience and an established early warning system. On March 11, a tsunami warning went out within three minutes to the three most-affected provinces, providing about 10 minutes to react. Instead of 25,000 dead and missing, with waves humbling nine-meter high seawalls, Lauterjung figures it all could've been much worse, although he and others even see room for new research, for improvement.

A German in Indonesia
Lauterjung's reference point is the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami which hit Indonesia and southern Asia. Some 250,000 people died that day. There was no early warning.

After that event the German government in Berlin pledged $60 million to build such a system: engineering, data processing and geologic experience were readily available. Lauterjung's team at the Helmholtz Association's Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) worked with a dozen other German science labs, private tech companies and international research institutions on the new system. It went online in 2008. Researchers have since been tweaking and optimizing it as well as educating system users, operators and the local population. The Indonesians are now poised to take over: Lauterjung was in Jakarta a couple weeks ago handing off the keys to the network.

The volcanic, earthquake-prone Sunda Arc, which forms the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java, lies along the boundary of two eastern Eurasian tectonic plates, putting Indonesia at high risk for "near-field" tsunamis like the one at Sendai. In order to issue an early warning, a precipitating earthquake must first be detected; alarm data is then transmitted to the Jakarta main warning center in the Indonesian capital. The resulting wave height and arrival time is determined, evaluated and retransmitted to a wide variety of potentially affected locations along the rough jungle coast of Sumatra. Warnings must be accurate—every false alarm erodes confidence in the system—and very rapid.

The baseline goal is to issue initial warnings and information to the public within five to 10 minutes of detecting risk. Even then, the local population must be notified and know how to respond. It is a tall order.

Hardware and software
The system has a set of main components and one master: time. The GFZ design connects four basic units, including seismic stations; a buoy and pressure-plate system to monitor wave motion; a set of coastal tide gauges; and a real-time GPS lattice network overlaying it all.

7 Comments

1. 1. jtdwyer 10:28 AM 4/14/11

   As stated, Japan is the country most prepared for tsunamis. As I understand, in this case the primary failure was the underestimation of the potential wave height. Earlier warnings may help, though, especially if they could include more and accurate information about the incoming wave.
   
   Effectively communicating timely warnings to large stretches of the Pacific Rim may be a more difficult matter.

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2. 2. craiger77 01:35 PM 4/14/11

   Dr Goldfinger didn't say that the earthquake is "sometimes" the warning, he said it is always the warning. If people hesitate to evacuate to higher ground because they are waiting for some signal that takes minutes to happen then they are going to decrease their chance of getting out of harms way. If you live near a subduction zone (as I do on the Oregon Coast) when you feel a substantial earthquake you get to higher ground immediately. Much of the money spent on this system could be better utilized educating people that earthquake means run. These kinds of earthquakes happen infrequently so what happens tens of years down the road when funds from Germany and other rich donors have dried up and the system isn't maintained, but the locals still have some faith that it will work and save them? If you are working in remote areas in less developed countries keeping it simple and cheap is what will save lives.

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3. 3. jtdwyer in reply to craiger77 03:45 PM 4/14/11

   True, coastal earthquakes can forewarn of a tsunami, but as I understand enormous tsunamis can also be produced by an earthquake on the other side of the ocean, thousands of miles away... Also, not all earthquakes produce tsunamis, so evacuating Seattle, for example, for any tremor might not be prudent in all cases.

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4. 4. dubina 07:05 PM 4/14/11

   Look at the earthquake maps from the 03/11 quake. Last I looked, I saw more than a thousand aftershocks, many in excess of M5, some, (couldn't see how many) well in advance of the Godzilla event. Most of the maps indicate seismic activity offshore, but no perceptible ground acceleration onshore. (One map did seem to show ground acceleration onshore)
   
   Thus, if Goldfinger thinks the quake is always the signal to take refuge, he is wrong. Undoubtedly, however, in the case of any massive ground acceleration in coastal locations, the correct reaction strategies are (a) run to high ground as soon and as fast as possible if high ground is nearby, or: (b) climb as high as possible in or on a sturdy building or man-made structure if no high ground is near, or (c) take refuge in a bouyant tsunami pod that would not be crushed by debris.
   
   Tragic that some villagers thought they would be safe behind tsunami walls and didn't move to higher ground. another lesson learned.

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5. 5. Tokyobling 09:23 PM 4/14/11

   I live in Tokyo and have been a few times to the tsunami struck area after the disaster. One thing that struck me listening to survivors who were actually caught by the tsunami was that many of those who were in their cars were unaware of the magnitude of the shock. In a moving car it can sometimes be difficult to estimate the danger potential of an earthquake. In the future, cars need to be rigged with an automatic override function that activates radio and GPS warning systems. For example, the GPS automatically switching to a route directing to higher ground or a point where you can access higher ground on foot.

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6. 6. kristi276 10:10 PM 4/14/11

   Ever since the tragedy of Japan there has been a lot of talk of early warning systems and how they can save lives, but is getting people to run to higher ground the best way of saving lives and property? It seems that the broader issues is the way cities can survive natural and man made disasters.
   When Japan rebuilds will it put back the same structures that caused the devastation in the first place, or will it really re-think how to best redevelop the area in order for the inhabitants to survive a greater tsunami/earthquake? If people are told to run to higher ground when the sirens wail how will older people and physically disabled sprint up the mountain in order to save their lives? What about children, or people that may be several miles away from higher ground? Is this the best we can come up with. Jogging shoes. We have to better that this. The quake in Haiti should have been a wake up call, but we slept that that one and the people of Haiti are still suffering. What about New Orleans? How many have to die before we do the right thing?

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7. 7. ENVME 04:20 PM 4/21/11

   Given the fact that Japan has the best tsunami predictive equipment in the world, then it is obvious that present technology is vastly inadequate. Rather than determining wave height and seismic changes, it seems to me that there must be precursors to environmental catastrophic events, in this case involving sudden massive vertical shifting of the ocean floor. Sudden cataclysmic geological events must have significant precursors that we are missing. To prevent tragic events as in the case of the Japan near field disaster, minutes of notice are insufficient. An earthquake or a sudden volcanic eruption can be considered to be a gigantic bomb which suddenly explodes. It is our challenge to adjust our technology to calculate beyond minutes, or even hours, to months or years in order to perform needed evacuations and harden or shut down infrastructure systems such as power plants. Technology must be adjusted and refined to detect and analyze and mobilize more sophisticated precursive warning systems. Alternative systems must be deployed.

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