The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of the Russian Far East triggered tsunami warnings in places including Hawaii and California, prompting evacuations and preparations. Later the same morning, it became clear that the tsunami reality was something of a letdown—in a good way. Even if everyone knew the waves wouldn't be fearsome, the warnings would have been a good idea, experts said. "A tsunami doesn't have to be 30 feet tall to cause intense destruction and death; even a relatively modest one can wash people and structures away with ease," Diego Melgar, an earthquake and tsunami scientist at the University of Oregon, told Scientific American.
Wednesday's tsunami wasn't a washout everywhere. Along Russia's Kamchatka coast, it was "a huge tsunami and mega-event," said Vasily Titov, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist who simulates tsunamis. There, it was comparable to the nearly 130-foot wave that hit Japan in 2011, he told the New York Times. "We got lucky that this energy did not go directly to US coastlines," Titov said. The first warnings are based only on estimates of the size and location of the source, Melgar said, "but this alone doesn't determine how much water is displaced or where waves will concentrate." A perfect forecast would require knowing "how much the fault slipped, over what area and how close to the trench the slip occurred," Melgar said.
Other variables come into play, but an overriding reason might be that the earthquake was major but not huge enough to cause a destructive tsunami after all. "There's big," Melgar said, per the Times. "And then there's really, really, really big." Details not yet known or understood might be key to understanding the event. "It's going to take weeks to months of research to figure out exactly what happened," said Melgar, who considers the response a success. "The warnings went out, and they were effective," he said.
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