Rubin, Charles M. and Horton, Benjamin P. and Sieh, Kerry and Pilarczyk, Jessica E. and Daly, Patrick and Ismail, Nazli and Parnell, Andrew (2017) Highly variable recurrence of tsunamis in the 7,400 years before the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Nature Communications, 8 (16019). ISSN 2041-1723

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Abstract

The devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caught millions of coastal residents and the scientific community off-guard. Subsequent research in the Indian Ocean basin has identified prehistoric tsunamis, but the timing and recurrence intervals of such events are uncertain. Here we present an extraordinary 7,400 year stratigraphic sequence of prehistoric tsunami deposits from a coastal cave in Aceh, Indonesia. This record demonstrates that at least 11 prehistoric tsunamis struck the Aceh coast between 7,400 and 2,900 years ago. The average time period between tsunamis is about 450 years with intervals ranging from a long, dormant period of over 2,000 years, to multiple tsunamis within the span of a century. Although there is evidence that the likelihood of another tsunamigenic earthquake in Aceh province is high, these variable recurrence intervals suggest that long dormant periods may follow Sunda megathrust ruptures as large as that of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Keywords:	tsunamis; 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; stratigraphic sequence; Aceh; Indonesia; Seismology;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > Hamilton Institute
Item ID:	10264
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms16019
Depositing User:	Andrew Parnell
Date Deposited:	03 Dec 2018 15:44
Journal or Publication Title:	Nature Communications
Publisher:	Nature Publshing Group
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	https://www.nature.com/ncomms/
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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