Animation: How landslides generate tsunamis

Areas with steep coastlines, narrow fjords, and glacially carved features such as Alaska, Greenland, and Norway are at risk from tsunamis generated by landslides sliding into coastal water bodies. Previously these events have been modeled with a two-phase model coupled together, using the output of the landslide model as the input for the tsunami model.

A new study in Geophysical Research Letters uses a model for a subaerial landslide-generated tsunami as one single continuum, a fusion of debris flow modelling and tsunami modelling in one problem.

These videos use the new model to simulate the landslide and resulting tsunami from the 2015 Tyndall Glacier Landslide in Alaska.

Credit: American Geophysical Union