Seabed seismic sensors would have cut 2011 Japan tsunami toll

By Andy Coghlan in Vienna, Austria

A new tsunami warning system could have saved many of the 22,000 people killed by the massive tsunami following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan, had it been in place there at the time.

That’s the message from simulations assessing how the system – now installed elsewhere in Japan – would have responded to the Tohoku quake itself.

They show that the system, based on a network of cable-connected seismic and pressure sensors placed on the seabed along quake-prone faults, would have raised the alarm in 7 minutes or less. Following the quake, it actually took 30 minutes for alarms to be sounded.

“It would have provided an extra 23 minutes,” says Yuichiro Tanioka of Hokkaido University, who presented the results last week at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria.

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