Tsunami: The Underrated Hazard

by Edward Bryant

In the past decade over ten major tsunami events have impacted on the world's coastlines, causing devastation and loss of life. Evidence for past great tsunami, or 'mega-tsunami', has also recently been discovered along apparently aseismic and protected coastlines. With a large proportion of the world's population living on the coastline, the threat from tsunami can not be ignored. This book comprehensively describes the nature and process of tsunami, outlines field evidence for detecting the presence of past events, and describes particular events linked to earthquakes, volcanoes, submarine landslides and meteorite impacts. While technical aspects are covered, much of the text can be read by anyone with a high school education. The book will appeal to students and researchers in geomorphology, earth and environmental science, and emergency planning, and will also be attractive for the general public interested in natural hazards and new developments in science.

Genres: Nonfiction

350 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 2001

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

A native Canadian, Edward Bryant has consulted for the Australian government on climate change and its effects on health and the environment. He has studied beach erosion, tsunamis, and coastal sedimentation and been a professor at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia.

Reviews

[Anne Hamilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book I've really really wanted to read for over a decade. I had such high hopes for it that it ran the risk of disappointing me in a serious way. Instead, it was full of surprises and delights. It's a wonderfully accessible book for the non-specialist while also containing a phalanx of equations and graphs to satisfy those of an academic bent.

Its photographs and diagrams of tsunami-formed features in the landscape were excellent. I'll never look at a beach the same way again. The book makes a clear distinction between landscape sculpted by storm surges and tsumani, often comparing the relative effects of the two.

It was published in 2001, three years before the Boxing Day tsunami that killed nearly a quarter of a million people in 13 Asian countries. As such, it proved the relevance of the sub-title, The Underrated Hazard.

It does not make the mistake of assuming that indigenous legends are simply myth - such as those of South-eastern Australia or the Alaskan coast. Instead, it looks at the aspects of the stories seriously, noting that their features conform to realistic scenarios for tsunamigenic events.

Perhaps the most interesting part for me personally was the description of a very common feature of tsunami as they reach land: vortices so powerful that they drill away rock.

[Rabbit {Paint me like one of your 19th century gothic heroines!} · Rating 4 out of 5]

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