Seismologist says more hours needed to measure potential tsunami across Pacific

Seismologist discusses the seismic waves from this morning’s earthquake off Russia’s Pacific Peninsula.

Transcript

00:00The data is just coming in now.

00:04The seismic waves from that earthquake that occurred a few hours ago are just arriving

00:08in Australia now, and it will take seismologists some time to fine-tune where the depth of

00:15the earthquake is, and that is important because it tells us more about the ground shaking

00:20and how much damage could occur in the region, as well as how large the associated tsunami

00:26could be.

00:27So that will be for later today, not immediately.

00:29So as mentioned, the speed at which the waves travel through the ocean are roughly the same

00:35as a jet airplane.

00:37So it's going to be many hours from them to travel from Kamchatka all the way down to New

00:42Zealand.

00:42But the expectation that there would be changes in currents is certainly something to be concerned

00:48about.

00:49And just briefly, with the limited information that you have on this, Megan, is it possible

00:55to compare what you've seen play out over the last three hours for anything that we've

00:59seen historically, how it might be likened to events that we've seen in the past with

01:04respect to earthquakes?

01:05So it's probably a bit premature to make too many comments on that.

01:11However, the very large tsunami in 2011 in Tohoku, so in Japan, that was a devastating tsunami.

01:19It was a larger earthquake, so it had about magnitude 9.1.

01:23And the scale that we use to measure the amount of energy released during our earthquake is logarithmic.

01:30So even though this one is an 8.7 or 8.8 versus a 9.1, there's a significant amount of energy

01:37difference between those two.