As sea levels rise due to climate change, so do the global hazards and potential devastating damages from tsunamis, according to a new study by a partnership that included Virginia Tech.

Even minor sea-level rise, by as much as a foot, poses greater risks of tsunamis for coastal communities worldwide.

The threat of rising sea levels to coastal cities and communities throughout the world is well known, but new findings show the likely increase of flooding farther inland from tsunamis following earthquakes. Think of the tsunami that devasted a portion of northern Japan after the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake, causing a nuclear plant to melt down and spread radioactive contamination.



These findings are at the center of a new Science Advances study, headed by a multi-university team of scientists from the Earth Observatory of Singapore, the Asian School of the Environment at Nanyang Technological University, and National Taiwan University, with critical support from Virginia Tech’s Robert Weiss, an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences, part of the College of Science.



“Our research shows that sea-level rise can significantly increase the tsunami hazard, which means that smaller tsunamis in the future can have the same adverse impacts as big tsunamis would today,” Weiss said, adding that smaller tsunamis generated by earthquakes with smaller magnitudes occur frequently and regularly around the world. For the study, Weiss was critical in helping create computational models and data analytics frameworks.



At Virginia Tech, Weiss serves as director of the National Science Foundation-funded Disaster Resilience and Risk Management graduate education program and is co-lead of Coastal@VT, composed of 45 Virginia Tech faculty from 13 departments focusing on contemporary and emerging coastal zone issues, such as disaster resilience, migration, sensitive ecosystems, hazard assessment, and natural infrastructure.

For the study, Weiss and his partners, including Lin Lin Li, a senior research fellow, and Adam Switzer, an associate professor, at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, created computer-simulated tsunamis at current sea level and with sea-level increases of 1.5 feet and 3 feet in the Chinese territory of Macau. Macau is a densely populated coastal region located in South China that is generally safe from current tsunami risks.

At current sea level, an earthquake would need to tip past a magnitude of 8.8 to cause widespread tsunami inundation in Macau. But with the simulated sea-level rises, the results surprised the team.