Glacial retreat in recent decades has exposed unstable slopes and allowed deep water to extend beneath some of those slopes. Slope failure at the terminus of Tyndall Glacier on 17 October 2015 sent 180 million tons of rock into Taan Fiord, Alaska. The resulting tsunami reached elevations as high as 193 m, one of the highest tsunami runups ever documented worldwide. Precursory deformation began decades before failure, and the event left a distinct sedimentary record, showing that geologic evidence can help understand past occurrences of similar events, and might provide forewarning. The event was detected within hours through automated seismological techniques, which also estimated the mass and direction of the slide - all of which were later confirmed by remote sensing. Our field observations provide a benchmark for modeling landslide and tsunami hazards. Inverse and forward modeling can provide the framework of a detailed understanding of the geologic and hazards implications of similar events. Our results call attention to an indirect effect of climate change that is increasing the frequency and magnitude of natural hazards near glaciated mountains.

Existing tsunami early warning systems in the world can give either one or a combination of estimated tsunami arrival times, heights, or qualitative tsunami forecasts before the tsunami hits near-field coastlines. A future tsunami early warning system should be able to provide a reliable near-field tsunami inundation forecast on high-resolution topography within a short time period. Here we describe a new methodology for near-field tsunami inundation forecasting. In this method, a precomputed tsunami inundation and precomputed tsunami waveform database is required. After information about a tsunami source is estimated, tsunami waveforms at nearshore points can be simulated in real time. A scenario that gives the most similar tsunami waveforms is selected as the site-specific best scenario and the tsunami inundation from that scenario is selected as the tsunami inundation forecast. To test the algorithm, tsunami inundation along the Sanriku Coast is forecasted by using source models for the 2011 Tohoku earthquake estimated from GPS, W phase, or offshore tsunami waveform data. The forecasting algorithm is capable of providing a tsunami inundation forecast that is similar to that obtained by numerical forward modeling but with remarkably smaller CPU time. The time required to forecast tsunami inundation in coastal sites from the Sendai Plain to Miyako City is approximately 3 min after information about the tsunami source is obtained. We found that the tsunami inundation forecasts from the 5 min GPS, 5 min W phase, 10 min W phase fault models, and 35 min tsunami source model are all reliable for tsunami early warning purposes and quantitatively match the observations well, although the latter model gives tsunami forecasts with highest overall accuracy. The required times to obtain tsunami forecast from the above four models are 8 min, 9 min, 14 min, and 39 min after the earthquake, respectively, or in other words 3 min after receiving the source model. This method can be useful in developing future tsunami forecasting systems with a capability of providing tsunami inundation forecasts for locations near the tsunami source area.

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Selection of the earthquake source used in tsunami models of the 2011 Tohoku event affects the simulated tsunami waveform across the near field. Different earthquake sources, based on inversions of seismic waveforms, tsunami waveforms, and Global Positioning System (GPS) data, give distinguishable patterns of simulated tsunami heights in many locations in Tohoku and at near-field Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) buoys. We compared 10 sources proposed by different research groups using the GeoClaw code to simulate the resulting tsunami. Several simulations accurately reproduced observations at simulation sites with high grid resolution. Many earthquake sources produced results within 20% difference from the observations between 38°and 39°N, including realistic inundation on the Sendai plain, reflecting a common reliance on large initial seafloor uplift around 38°N (0:5°), 143.25°E (0:75°). As might be expected, DART data was better reproduced by sources created by inversion techniques that incorporated DART data in the inversion. Most of the earthquake sources tested at sites with high grid resolution were unable to reproduce the magnitude of runup north of 39°N, indicating that an additional source of tsunamigenic energy, not present in most source models, is needed to explain these observations.