![]() In the deep ocean, a tsunami wave might be more than 300 miles long but only a meter or less in height, making it unnoticeable to the people on the ships floating above. His paper focused on data collected in 2010, when a tsunami generated by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake happened to pass underneath a University of Hawaii research vessel en route to Guam that was equipped with high-accuracy GPS. “The period of the tsunami, the time over which the wave passes the ship, is on the order of 10, 20, 30 minutes, whereas ocean waves have a period of maybe 15, 20 seconds,” says James Foster, a professor at the Institute of Geodesy, University of Stuttgart, who authored an early paper on commercial ships and tsunami warnings. But a passing tsunami slightly alters the sea surface elevation, changing the average elevation throughout the rhythmic up-down cycle. “But if you have a bunch of ships, then they would be going up and down in a pattern that could be used to determine whether it’s a tsunami.”īoats steadily bob amid the waves. “With just one ship, it would be difficult to tell if the signal you’re seeing is noise or a tsunami,” says study senior author Anne Sheehan, a professor in the University of Colorado Boulder’s department of geological sciences. This approach, which researchers simulated in a recently published paper, aims to significantly enhance detection and forecast abilities by simply turning existing ships into a floating array for sensing waves, all without having to spend a lot of money on new infrastructure. While ferrying goods, commercial vessels could leverage their GPS systems to form a distributed network of sensors capable of picking up subtle elevation changes indicative of a passing tsunami, a series of large waves most often caused by earthquakes under the sea. But to improve warning, the thousands of cargo ships that traverse the world’s oceans could offer critical, if unexpected, assistance. Major tsunamis are rare throughout history, but it’s often impossible to know exactly when and where one will occur. This March marked 10 years since the Tohoku earthquake triggered a devastating tsunami off the northeast coast of Japan.
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