Wednesday, March 16, 2005
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Study: Tsunami Threat High in Caribbean

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
Associated Press Writer

March 16, 2005, 1:18 PM EST
WASHINGTON -- Studies of both history and geology indicate that the northern Caribbean faces a high threat of devastating tsunami damage.
Rapidly rising populations along the east and Gulf coasts of the United States and Caribbean islands place more than 35 million people at risk, according to a study being published in the March 22 issue of Eos, the newspaper of the American Geophysical Union.
The report comes in the wake of a Dec. 26 tsunami, generated by an earthquake near Indonesia, that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives around the Indian Ocean.
Historical records show 10 tsunamis have occurred in the Caribbean since 1492. The most recent, in 1946, was triggered by an earthquake in the Dominican Republic and killed 1,800 people.
"More sobering than the historical record of tsunamis is the presence of large-scale underwater landslide features that may have produced immense, prehistoric tsunamis," says the report from researchers Nancy Grindlay and Meghan Hearne of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and Paul Mann of the University of Texas at Austin.
Undersea quakes and landslides can generate tsunami waves dozens of feet tall sweeping ashore with devastating power.
The researchers noted that the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates meet in the northern Caribbean, moving against one another to generate instability.
"The recent devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean has raised public awareness of tsunami hazard and the need for early warning systems in high-risk areas such as the Caribbean," Grindlay said in a statement.
A regional tsunami warning system proposal has been approved by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, and meetings to plan implementation are scheduled for this spring and summer.
A similar warning was published in December in the Journal of Geophysical Research by Uri ten Brink of the U.S. Geological Survey.
A tsunami is a series of waves generated by undersea events such as earthquakes. They appear small in the deep ocean, but on approaching shore the waves ran rise to great heights, sometimes being reported at 40 feet and more as they crash ashore.
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