A recent study revealed that there was a large-scale tsunami that could travel as far as 10,000 km originating from a large earthquake, but was not detected.
The tsunami struck and spread in the northern Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, in August 2021. It is suspected that the large tsunami was caused by an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.5 detected near the South Sandwich Islands.
Meanwhile, this is the first recorded tsunami to reach three different oceans since the last time was in 2004, where the epicenter of the earthquake was in the Indian Ocean.
"This event is special because it is large and quiet. In the data we usually see (for earthquake monitoring) it is almost invisible," said Zhe Jia, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology quoted from Space, Monday (14/2/2022).
A study related to a large tsunami from this 'unseen' earthquake was published on February 8 in the Journal Geophysical Research Letters.
This study describes the earthquake as actually a sequence of five sub-earthquakes, separated by just a few minutes. But this earthquake was not detected by the monitoring system at that time.
That's what makes scientists confused about the origin of the earthquake that created a tsunami up to 10,000 km away.
So far the quake is thought to have been 47 km below the seabed and the tectonic plate breaking which gave birth to a nearly 400 km long crack that caused a major earthquake.
Most earthquake and tsunami warning systems tend to focus on tracking short to medium period seismological waves, leaving waves with longer periods that are still capable of generating potentially life-threatening tsunamis.
The scientist wants to set a long-term goal to design a system that can automatically detect and alert coastal areas to earthquakes that cause tsunamis.
"This study is a great example of how we can understand these events at work and how we can detect them more quickly so we can have more warnings in the future," said Judith Hubbard, a geologist at the Earth Observatory of Singapore.