BACKGROUND

• Main Authors: Award Number Nanws, Contact James, T. Kirby
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: Fig. 1; Potential tsunami sources for U.S. East coast in the North Atlantic Ocean basin (ETOPO2’s two second; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.593.9334; http://chinacat.coastal.udel.edu/nthmp/NTHMP-Semi-Annual-Report-Kirby-East-Coast-August-2013.pdf

Tsunami hazard assessment along the US East Coast (USEC) is still in its infancy, in part due to the lack of historical tsunami records and the uncertainty regarding the magnitude and return periods of potential large-scale events (e.g., transoceanic tsunamis caused by a large Lisbon 1755 type earthquake in the Azores-Gibraltar convergence zone, a large earthquake in the Caribbean subduction zone in the Puerto Rico (PRT) trench or near Leeward Islands, or a flank collapse of the Cumbre Vieja Volcano (CVV) in the Canary Islands) (Fig. 1). Moreover, considerable geologic (e.g., Chaytor et al., 2009; Twichell et al., 2009) and some historical evidence (e.g., the 1929 Grand Bank landslide tsunami, and the Currituck slide site off North Carolina and Virginia) suggests that the most significant tsunami hazard in this region may arise from Submarine Mass Failures (SMF) triggered on the continental slope by moderate seismic activity (as low as Mw = 6 to the maximum expected in the region Mw = 7.5); such tsunamigenic landslides can potentially cause concentrated coastal damage affecting specific communities (Fig. 1). In this project, we assess tsunami hazard from the above and other relevant tsunami sources recently studied in the literature (ten Brink et al., 2007, 2008), and model the corresponding tsunami inundation in affected USEC communities. Based on our past experience with a variety