{"id":497263,"date":"2026-01-06T20:19:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T20:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/497263\/"},"modified":"2026-01-06T20:19:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T20:19:09","slug":"tsunami-triggered-by-giant-russian-quake-broke-the-rules-satellite-data-shows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/497263\/","title":{"rendered":"Tsunami Triggered by Giant Russian Quake Broke the Rules, Satellite Data Shows"},"content":{"rendered":"

On July 29, 2025, the world\u2019s sixth biggest recorded earthquake<\/a> struck Russia, triggering a tsunami<\/a> whose waves reached as far as the U.S.\u2019s West Coast. Data from an unexpected source\u2014space\u2014has shed unexpected light on this oceanic reaction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, whose aim is to survey the planet\u2019s surface water, documented the first high-resolution track of a significant subduction zone tsunami from space, a team of researchers claims in a study<\/a> published last November in the journal The Seismic Record. This information could shed light on how tsunamis move and potentially impact coasts.<\/p>\n

\u201c[We] had been analyzing SWOT data for over two years understanding different processes in the ocean like small eddies, never imagining that we would be fortunate enough to capture a tsunami,\u201d Angel Ruiz-Angulo, co-author of the study and a Physical Oceanographer at the University of Iceland, said in a statement<\/a> by the Seismological Society of America.<\/p>\n

Your tsunami nightmares are inaccurate <\/p>\n

When you think of a tsunami wave, chances are you imagine a single terrifying wall of water advancing all at once. In fact, since a large tsunami\u2019s wavelength is significantly greater than the ocean\u2019s depth, researchers typically deem them \u201cnon-dispersive.\u201d In other words, scientists predict the wave will move as a single cohesive unit and not fragment into a number of propagating waves. SWOT\u2019s data, however, revealed that the tsunami triggered by Russia\u2019s magnitude 8.8 earthquake didn\u2019t propagate as a single wave but as a complex movement of interacting waves.<\/p>\n

This calls into question the notion that large tsunamis are non-dispersive, explained Ruiz-Angulo. In fact, he and his colleagues noted that computer models of tsunamis that accounted for dispersion better aligned with the real satellite data than standard models.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main impact that this observation has for tsunami modelers is that we are missing something in the models we used to run,\u201d he added. \u201cThis \u2018extra\u2019 variability could represent that the main wave could be modulated by the trailing waves as it approaches some coast. We would need to quantify this excess of dispersive energy and evaluate if it has an impact that was not considered before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Refined estimates of the Russian quake <\/p>\n

The team merged the satellite measurements with data from Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) buoys on the tsunami\u2019s route.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think of SWOT data as a new pair of glasses,\u201d explained Ruiz-Angulo. \u201cBefore, with DARTs we could only see the tsunami at specific points in the vastness of the ocean. There have been other satellites before, but they only see a thin line across a tsunami in the best-case scenario. Now, with SWOT, we can capture a swath up to about 120 kilometers [75 miles] wide, with unprecedented high-resolution data of the sea surface.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the buoys helped refine the original estimates of the earthquake. The team found that the tsunami arrival times estimated by previous simulations didn\u2019t align with the real-life data from two DART tide gauges. As such, the researchers took another look at the original earthquake by employing the buoy information in a type of analysis called inversion. This approach indicated that the rupture stretched south more than researchers believed and was around 250 miles (400 kilometers), which is also strikingly longer than other computer models suggested.<\/p>\n

Since the monstrous magnitude 9.0 2011 earthquake in Japan, co-author Diego Melgar\u2019s lab and others have attempted to incorporate DART information in inversions. However, because the models necessary to simulate DARTs differ significantly from the ones necessary for data from the solid ground, this doesn\u2019t happen all the time, Melgar explained. \u201cBut, as shown here again, it is really important we mix as many types of data as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On July 29, 2025, the world\u2019s sixth biggest recorded earthquake struck Russia, triggering a tsunami whose waves reached…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":497264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[12635,2540,159,53701,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-497263","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-earthquakes","9":"tag-satellites","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-tsunamis","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115850010179658232","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}