The Large Greenland Landslide of 2017: Was a Tsunami Warning Possible?
Journal
Seismological Research Letters
Date Issued
2018-04
Author(s)
Abstract
Tsunamis generated by mass movements such as landslides, underwater slumps, and rock avalanches can lead to serious inundation of nearby populated areas. The lack of timely estimations of the moving mass volume, however, makes providing operational early warnings for landslides particularly challenging. In June 2017, a large landslide in Greenland generated tsunami waves of about 1 m high that impacted the small town of Nuugaatsiaq. We show how the seismic analysis of real-time seismic records from the Greenland Ice Sheet Monitoring Network (GLISN) can provide estimates of essential physical properties of the landslide such as collapse mass and sliding velocity shortly after origin time. The estimation of the landslide source parameters can be utilized for tsunamiwave simulations. We demonstrate how the real-time integration of seismic waveform inversion with forward tsunami-wave simulation could have enabled a timely operational warning (about 10 min) before the arrival of the impending tsunami waves at the village of Nuugaatsiaq. © 2018 Seismological Society of America. All rights reserved.
Other Subjects
Seismology; Tsunamis; Waveform analysis; Greenland Ice Sheet; Operational warnings; Real time integration; Seismic analysis; Seismic records; Seismic waveform inversion; Sliding velocities; Source parameters; Landslides; early warning system; landslide; seismic wave; tsunami; wave generation; Arctic; Greenland
Type
journal article