A Phenomenological Reconstruction of the Mw9 November 1st 1755 Earthquake Source

Muir-Wood, Robert; Mignan, Arnaud

doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-8609-0_8

Cited by 16 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…As temporal processes evolve, so do cascading phenomena: earthquakes could directly trigger fires prior to the 20th century when households were lighted by candles that could fall due to ground shaking (e.g., 1755 Lisbon earthquake [ 35 ]). Nowadays, direct fires are much less likely, occurring via critical infrastructure and network failures (e.g., gas leak).…”

Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Space of Possibilities in Cascading Disasters with Catastrophe Dynamics

Mignan

Wang

2020

IJERPH

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Some of the most devastating natural events on Earth, such as earthquakes and tropical cyclones, are prone to trigger other natural events, critical infrastructure failures, and socioeconomic disruptions. Man-made disasters may have similar effects, although to a lesser degree. We investigate the space of possible interactions between 19 types of loss-generating events, first by encoding possible one-to-one interactions into an adjacency matrix A, and second by calculating the interaction matrix M of emergent chains-of-events. We first present the impact of 24 topologies of A on M to illustrate the non-trivial patterns of cascading processes, in terms of the space of possibilities covered and of interaction amplification by feedback loops. We then encode A from 29 historical cases of cascading disasters and compute the matching matrix M. We observe, subject to data incompleteness, emergent cascading behaviors in the technological and socioeconomic systems, across all possible triggers (natural or man-made); disease is also a systematic emergent phenomenon. We find interactions being mostly amplified via two events: network failure and business interruption, the two events with the highest in-degree and betweenness centralities. This analysis demonstrates how cascading disasters grow in and cross over natural, technological, and socioeconomic systems.

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Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Space of Possibilities in Cascading Disasters with Catastrophe Dynamics

Mignan

Wang

2020

IJERPH

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“…It was also the source of the great November 1, 1755 Lisbon earthquake with estimated magnitude Mw 8.5-9.0 (e.g., Johnston, 1996;Muir-Wood and Mignan, 2009). The tsunami wave, generated by the 1755 earthquake propagated across the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern Lesser Antilles and Brazil and to Newfoundland, Canada (Kozak et al, 2005;Roger et al, 2010).…”

Section: Earthquakes In the Azores-gibraltar Plate Boundarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of tsunami hazard to the U.S. Atlantic margin

et al. 2014

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Keywords: submarine landslides meteo-tsunami earthquakes and landslides probabilistic hazard assessment Tsunami hazard is a very low-probability, but potentially high-risk natural hazard, posing unique challenges to scientists and policy makers trying to mitigate its impacts. These challenges are illustrated in this assessment of tsunami hazard to the U.S. Atlantic margin. Seismic activity along the U.S. Atlantic margin in general is low, and confirmed paleo-tsunami deposits have not yet been found, suggesting a very low rate of hazard. However, the devastating 1929 Grand Banks tsunami along the Atlantic margin of Canada shows that these events continue to occur. Densely populated areas, extensive industrial and port facilities, and the presence of ten nuclear power plants along the coast, make this region highly vulnerable to flooding by tsunamis and therefore even lowprobability events need to be evaluated. We can presently draw several tentative conclusions regarding tsunami hazard to the U.S. Atlantic coast. Landslide tsunamis likely constitute the biggest tsunami hazard to the coast. Only a small number of landslides have so far been dated and they are generally older than 10,000 years. The geographical distribution of landslides along the margin is expected to be uneven and to depend on the distribution of seismic activity along the margin and on the geographical distribution of Pleistocene sediment. We do not see evidence that gas hydrate dissociation contributes to the generation of landslides along the U.S. Atlantic margin. Analysis of landslide statistics along the fluvial and glacial portions of the margin indicate that most of the landslides are translational, were probably initiated by seismic acceleration, and failed as aggregate slope failures. How tsunamis are generated from aggregate landslides remains however, unclear. Estimates of the recurrence interval of earthquakes along the continental slope may provide maximum estimates for the recurrence interval of landslide along the margin. Tsunamis caused by atmospheric disturbances and by coastal earthquakes may be more frequent than those generated by landslides, but their amplitudes are probably smaller. Among the possible far-field earthquake sources, only earthquakes located within the Gulf of Cadiz or west of the Tore-Madeira Rise are likely to affect the U.S. coast. It is questionable whether earthquakes on the Puerto Rico Trench are capable of producing a large enough tsunami that will affect the U.S. Atlantic coast. More information is needed to evaluate the seismic potential of the northern Cuba fold-and-thrust belt. The hazard from a volcano flank collapse in the Canary Islands is likely smaller than originally stated, and there is not enough information to evaluate the magnitude and frequency of flank collapse from the Azores Islands. Both deterministic and probabilistic methods to evaluate the tsunami hazard from the margin are available for application to the Atlantic margin, but their implementation requires more information than is c...

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“…Several large tsunamigenic earthquakes have occurred in these areas. In the ACZ/LSB area, which is located along the western segment of the Eurasia-Nubia Plate Boundary, between the Azores archipelago and the Strait of Gibraltar [7], some of these historical earthquakes have caused large transoceanic tsunamis, but the Lisbon 1755 earthquake, of estimated magnitude M8.6-9 [41,8], triggered the largest known historical tsunami. With 5-15 m high waves impacting the coast, this event caused extensive destruction and tens of thousands of fatalities, in the near-field in Lisbon and its area (in combination with seismicity and fires), while also reaching the coasts of Morocco, England, Newfoundland, Brazil, and the Antilles.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Various studies have placed its magnitude in the M8.6 to 9 range and its most likely location in the Horseshoe Fault to the East of the ACZ and Madeira Torre Rise (MTR; Fig. 1) [41,8]. MTR is an underwater ridge that likely caused westward propagating tsunami waves to be somewhat diverted from aiming at the USEC and, hence, offered some level of protection to the coast.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tsunami Coastal Hazard Along the Us East Coast From Coseismic Sources in the açores Convergence Zone and the Caribbean Arc Areas

Grilli

Mohammadpour

Schambach

et al. 2021

Preprint

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We model the coastal hazard caused by tsunamis along the US East Coast (USEC) for far-field coseismic sources originated in the A\c{c}ores Convergence Zone (ACZ), and the Puerto Rico Trench (PRT)/Caribbean Arc area. In earlier work, similar modeling was performed for probable maximum tsunamis (PMTs) resulting from coseismic, submarine mass failure and volcanic collapse sources in the Atlantic Ocean basin, based on which tsunami inundation maps were developed in high hazard areas of the USEC. Here, in preparation for a future Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Analysis (PTHA), we model a collection of 18 coseismic sources with magnitude ranging from M8 to M9 and return periods estimated in the 100-2,000 year range. Most sources are hypothetical, based on the seismo-tectonic data known for the considered areas. However, the largest sources from the ACZ, which includes the region of the Madeira Tore Rise, are parameterized as repeats of the 1755 M8.6-9 (Lisbon) earthquake and tsunami using information from many studies published on this event, which is believed to have occurred east of the MTR. Many other large events have been documented to have occurred in this area in the past 2,000 years. There have also been many large historical coseismic tsunamis in and near the Puerto Rico Trench (PRT) area, triggered by earthquakes with the largest in the past 225 years having an estimated M8.1 magnitude. In this area, coseismic sources are parameterized based on information from a 2019 USGS Powell Center expert, attended by the first author, and a collection of SIFT subfaults for the area (Gica et al., 2008). For each source, regional tsunami hazard assessment is performed along the USEC at a coarse 450 m resolution by simulating tsunami propagation to the USEC with FUNWAVE-TVD (a nonlinear and dispersive (2D) Boussinesq model), in nested grids. Tsunami coastal hazard is represented by four metrics, computed along the 5 m isobath, which quantify inundation, navigation, structural, and evacuation hazards: (1) maximum surface elevation; (2) maximum current velocity; (3) maximum momentum force; and (4) tsunami arrival time. Overall, the first three factors are larger, the larger the source magnitude, and their alongshore variation shows similar patterns of higher and lower values, due to bathymetric control from the wide USEC shelf, causing similar wave refraction patterns of focusing/defocusing for each tsunami. The fourth factor differs mostly between sources from each area (ACZ and PRT), but less so among sources from the same area; its inverse is used as a measure of increased hazard associated with short warning/evacuation times. Finally, a new tsunami intensity index (TII) is computed, that attaches a score to each metric within 5 hazard intensity classes selected for each factor, reflecting low, medium low, medium, high and highest hazard, and is computed as a weighted average of these scores (weights can be selected to reinforce the effect of certain metrics). For each source, the TII provides an overall tsunami hazard intensity along the USEC coast that allows both a comparison among sources and a quantification of tsunami hazard as a function of the source return period. At the most impacted areas of the USEC (0.1 percentile), we find that tsunami hazard in the 100-500 year return period range is commensurate with that posed by category 3-5 tropical cyclones, taking into account the larger current velocities and forces caused by tsunami waves. Based on results of this work, high-resolution inundation PTHA maps will be developed in the future, similar to the PMT maps, in areas identified to have higher tsunami hazard, using more levels of nested grids, to achieve a 10-30 m resolution along the coast.

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A Phenomenological Reconstruction of the Mw9 November 1st 1755 Earthquake Source

Cited by 16 publications

References 37 publications

Exploring the Space of Possibilities in Cascading Disasters with Catastrophe Dynamics

Exploring the Space of Possibilities in Cascading Disasters with Catastrophe Dynamics

Assessment of tsunami hazard to the U.S. Atlantic margin

Tsunami Coastal Hazard Along the Us East Coast From Coseismic Sources in the açores Convergence Zone and the Caribbean Arc Areas

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