Tag: Indian Ocean

Tsunami risk in East Africa

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The 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was one of the deadliest natural disasters since the start of the 20th century, with an estimated death toll of around 230 thousand. Millions more were deeply traumatised, bereft of homes and possessions, rendered short of food and clean water, and threatened by disease. Together with that launched onto the seaboard of eastern Japan by the Sendai earthquake of 11 March 2011, it has spurred research into detecting the signs of older tsunamis left in coastal sedimentary deposits (see for instance: Doggerland and the Storegga tsunami, December 2020). In normally quiet coastal areas these tsunamites commonly take the form of sand sheets interbedded with terrestrial sediments, such as peaty soils. On shores fully exposed to the ocean the evidence may take the form of jumbles of large boulders that could not have been moved by even the worst storm waves.

Sand sheets attributed to a succession of tsunamis, interbedded with peaty soils deposited in a swamp on Phra Thong Island, Thailand. Note that a sand sheet deposited by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is directly beneath the current swamp surface (Credit: US Geological Survey)

Most of the deaths and damage wrought by the 2004 tsunami were along coasts bordering the Bay of Bengal in Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, India and Sri Lanka, and the Nicobar Islands. Tsunami waves were recorded on the coastlines of Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania, but had far lower amplitudes and energy so that fatalities – several hundred – were restricted to coastal Somalia. East Africa was protected to a large extent by the Indian subcontinent taking much of the wave energy released by the magnitude 9.1 to 9.3 earthquake (the third largest recorded) beneath Aceh at the northernmost tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Yet the subduction zone that failed there extends far to the southeast along the Sunda Arc. Earthquakes further along that active island arc might potentially expose parts of East Africa to far higher wave energy, because of less protection by intervening land masses.

This possibility, together with the lack of any estimate of tsunami risk for East Africa, drew a multinational team of geoscientists to the estuary of the Pangani River  in Tanzania (Maselli, V. and 12 others 2020. A 1000-yr-old tsunami in the Indian Ocean points to greater risk for East Africa. Geology, v. 48, p. 808-813; DOI: 10.1130/G47257.1). Archaeologists had previously examined excavations for fish farming ponds and discovered the relics of an ancient coastal village. Digging further pits revealed a tell-tale sheet of sand in a sequence of alluvial sediments and peaty silts and fine sands derived from mangrove swamps. The peats contained archaeological remains – sherds of pottery and even beads. The tsunamite sand sheet occurs within the mangrove facies. It contains pebbles of bedrock that also litter the open shoreline of this part of Tanzania. There are also fossils; mainly a mix of marine molluscs and foraminifera with terrestrial rodents fish, birds and amphibians. But throughout the sheet, scattered at random, are human skeletons and disarticulated bones of male and female adults, and children. Many have broken limb bones, but show no signs of blunt-force trauma or disease pathology. Moreover, there is no sign of ritual burial or weaponry; the corpses had not resulted from massacre or epidemic. The most likely conclusion is that they are victims of an earlier Indian Ocean tsunami. Radiocarbon dating shows that it occurred at some time between the 11th and 13th centuries CE. This tallies with evidence from Thailand, Sumatra, the Andaman and Maldive Islands, India and Sri Lanka for a major tsunami in 950 CE.

Computer modelling of tsunami propagation reveals that the Pangani River lies on a stretch of the Tanzanian coast that is likely to have been sheltered from most Indian Ocean tsunamis by Madagascar and the shallows around the Seychelles Archipelago. Seismic events on the Sunda Arc or the lesser, Makran subduction zone of eastern Iran may not have been capable of generating sufficient energy to raise tsunami waves at the latitudes of the Tanzanian coast much higher than those witnessed there in 2004, unless their arrival coincided with high tide – damage was prevented in 2004 because of low tide levels. However, the topography of the Pangani estuary may well amplify water level by constricting a surge. Such a mechanism can account for variations of destruction during the 2011 Tohoku-Sendai tsunami in NE Japan.

If coastal Tanzania is at high risk of tsunamis, that can only be confirmed by deeper excavation into coastal sediments to check for multiple sand sheets that characterise areas closer to the Sunda Arc. So far, that in the Pangani estuary is the only one recorded in East Africa

Birth of a plate boundary rocks the planet

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English: Historical seismicity across the Sund...
Historical seismicity across the Sunda trench(credit: Wikipedia)

Few people will fail to remember the Indian Ocean tsunamis of 26 December 2004 because of their quarter-million death toll. The earthquake responsible for them resulted from thrusting movements on the subduction zone where part of the India-Australia plate descends beneath Sumatra. There have been some equally large but far less devastating events and many lesser earthquakes in the same region since. Some have been on the massive Wadati-Benioff zone but many, including two with magnitudes >8 in April 2012, have occurred well off the known plate boundary. Oddly, those two had strike-slip motions and were the largest such events since seismic records have been kept. Such motions where masses of lithosphere move past one another laterally can be devastating on land, yet offshore ones rarely cause tsunamis, for a simple reason: they neither lift nor drop parts of the ocean floor. So, to the world at large, both events went unreported.

To geophysicists, however, they were revealing oddities, for there is no bathymetric sign of an active sea-floor strike-slip fault. But there is a series of linear gravity anomalies running roughly N-S thought to represent transform faults that were thought to have shut down about 45 Ma ago (Delescluse, M. et al. 2012. April 2012 intra-oceanic seismicity off Sumatra boosted by the Banda-Aceh megathrust. Nature (on-line 27 September issue) doi:10.1038/nature11520). Examining the post-December 2004 seismic record of the area the authors noted a flurry of lesser events, mostly in the vicinity of the long dead fracture zones. Their analysis leads them to suggest not only that the Banda-Aceh earthquake and others along the Sumatran subduction zone reactivated the old strike-slip faults but that differences in the motion of the India-Australia plate continually stress the lithosphere. Indian continental crust is resisting subduction beneath the Himalaya thereby slowing plate movement in its wake. Ocean lithosphere north of Australia slides more easily down the subduction zone, so its northward motion is substantially faster, creating a torque in the region affected by the strike-slip motions. Ultimately, it is thought, this will split the plate into separate Indian and Australian plates.

Another surprising outcome of this complex seismic linkage in the far-east of the Indian Ocean is that the April strike-slip earthquake set the Earth ringing. For six days afterwards there was a five-fold increase in events of magnitudes greater than 5.5 more than 1500 km away, including some of around magnitude 7.0 (Polliitz, F.F. et al. 2012. The 11 April 2012 east Indian Ocean earthquake triggered large aftershocks worldwide. Nature (on-line 27 September issue) doi:10.1038/nature11504). Although distant minor shocks often follow large earthquakes, this is the first time that a swarm of magnitude 5.5 and greater has been noticed.

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