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Contrary to Previous Belief, Strike-Slip Faults Can Generate Large Tsunamis

Contrary to Previous Belief, Strike-Slip Faults Can Generate

Large Tsunamis
May 03, 2021

New study explains why Palu was slammed by an unusually huge tsunami in 2018

Credit: Image courtesy of Costas Synolakis

On September 28, 2018, an inexplicably large tsunami devastated the

Indonesian coastal city of Palu and several others nearby. Between the
tsunami and the magnitude 7.5 earthquake that caused it, some 4,340
people were killed, making it the deadliest earthquake that year.

The tsunami's waves reached around six meters high, which was a shock to geophysicists who had
believed that earthquakes along a strike-slip fault could only trigger far smaller tsunamis for that
particular region. Now, new research describes a mechanism for these large tsunamis to form, and
suggests that other coastal cities that were thought to be safe from massive tsunamis may need to
reevaluate their level of risk.

Most large tsunamis are triggered by earthquakes along thrust faults, where one piece of crust is
shoving its way over the top of another. Motion along such a fault creates a large vertical displacement,
which, when the fault is under water, generates massive waves.

Strike-slip faults, by contrast, occur where two pieces of crust are moving horizontally and alongside
one another, yielding very little vertical displacement.

"Whenever we saw large tsunamis triggered by earthquakes along strike-slip faults, people assumed
that perhaps the earthquake had caused an undersea landslide, displacing water that way," says Ares
Rosakis, the Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering at Caltech
and corresponding author of a paper on the new research that was published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on May 3.

About a month after the Palu tsunami, Rosakis attended a National Science Foundation (NSF)
seismology workshop at Caltech organized by Nadia Lapusta, the Lawrence A. Hanson, Jr., Professor
of Mechanical Engineering and Geophysics; there, he connected with Ahmed Elbanna (PhD '11), who

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worked with Lapusta and

Professor of Engineering
Seismology, Emeritus, Tom
Heaton (PhD '78) while
earning his degree at
Caltech.

"The workshop wasn't

supposed to be about Palu,
but you get a bunch of
seismologists together right
after an event like that, and
of course we'll be discussing
it," says Elbanna, associate
professor and Donald Biggar
Willett faculty fellow at the
University of Illinois Urbana-
Champaign (UIUC), and lead
author of the PNAS paper. "It
puzzled the community. Why
would these types of faults
create this effect?"

At that time, very little was

known about the quake.
Early evidence suggested
that the earthquake rupture
Propagation of the September 28, 2018 Sulawesi tsunami showing two hours of tsunami
amplitude dynamics at Palu bay after generation by the earthquake. had been supershear,
Credit: NOAA Center for Tsunami Research
meaning that the speed of
the rupture exceeded the
velocity of seismic shear
waves. The existence of
supershear ruptures was first
discovered experimentally at
Caltech in 2000 by Rosakis
and Hiroo Kanamori, the
John E. and Hazel S. Smits
Professor of Geophysics,
Emeritus.

These hyper-fast
earthquakes tend to occur
on long faults (on the order 
of 100 kilometers or more),
The aftermath of the tsunami that struck Palu in 2018.
where the rupture can gain
Credit: Courtesy of Costas Synolakis
speed as it rips along. The
phenomenon is much like an
aircraft breaking the speed of sound, generating a Mach wave that manifests as a sonic boom; in the
case of hyper-fast earthquakes, a destructive Mach wave front is emitted from the fast-traveling tip of
the rupture zone.

"Ares is a pioneer in the area of supershear quakes, and Palu was a supershear quake, so we started
questioning whether there was a connection that created the tsunami," Elbanna says.

"I always suspected that the supershear nature of the quake was the reason, and I thought that the
interaction of the Mach fronts with sides of the Palu bay may have had something to do with it. I shared
my thoughts with Ahmed, and we decided to join forces and numerically explore this issue," Rosakis
says. "A few months later, we also joined forces with my longtime collaborators in France: Harsha Bhat
of ENS, my former postdoc at Caltech; and Faisal Amlani (PhD '13). They were also looking at a
possible connection between the supershear nature of the earthquake and the tsunami characteristics
at Palu and had, by that time, obtained conclusive evidence, from near-fault GPS station data, that the
Palu rupture was indeed supershear," Rosakis adds.
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To jump-start this research,

Rosakis and Elbanna pooled
funding. Elbanna used
funding from his NSF
CAREER award that
supports his research on
faults and fluids. Rosakis
applied for and quickly
received seed funding from
the Caltech/Mechanical and
Civil Engineering (MCE) Big
 Ideas Fund, established in
Computer modeling shows how a supershear rupture evolves along a strike-slip fault while 2018 by members of MCE's
emanating shock waves that affect distant sites. External Advisory Board
Credit: Credit: Courtesy of Ahmed Elbanna
including chairman and
alumnus Lon Bell (BS '62; MS '63, PhD '68), founder of Gentherm.

Meanwhile, in then-unrelated work, Costas Synolakis (BS '78, MS '79, PhD '86), an expert on tsunamis
and tsunami-hazard mitigation, was also trying to learn more about what happened at Palu. Synolakis,
who is currently president of Athens College in Greece while on sabbatical from his position as
professor of civil/environmental engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, convinced the
Indonesian government to let him bring a small team of scientists to the area shortly after the disaster to
document any ephemeral evidence that might explain the cause of the large tsunami.

Funded by an NSF grant,

Synolakis and his crew of
five researchers arrived in
Palu about three weeks after
the tsunami and deployed
airborne drones, shot video,
interviewed eyewitnesses,
and conducted surveys
using LIDAR (an acronym for
Light Detection and Ranging;
a three-dimensional laser-
scanning technology). "The

tsunami was totally out of The interplay between bay bathymetry and earthquake waves leads to emergence of multiple
scale, about three times the tsunami waves.
Credit: Courtesy of Ahmed Elbanna
size you'd expect." Synolakis
says. "We carefully
documented the impact of the tsunami and its height. And then we had to think, 'How could this have
happened from an earthquake that was not supposed to do this?'"

Synolakis and his team stayed in the devastated area for a week, trying to learn as much as they could
before the evidence was erased as the cleanup and reconstruction began. "The hardest part is talking to
people about something like that," Synolakis says. "It looked like a bulldozer had come in and leveled
the town. We talked to the relatives and friends of people who had died; people whose homes and
possessions were all washed away. This is why it is so important that we try to understand what really
happened."

When he returned to the States, Synolakis talked to his old friend Rosakis about what he had seen.
Synolakis and Rosakis attended Athens College together in the early 1970s.

While their research does not typically overlap—Rosakis deals with the solid mechanics of the moving
earth, while Synolakis deals more with the fluid mechanics of the ocean—in this case, they found
common ground, so to speak. "Here, we are coupling solid mechanics with fluid mechanics," Rosakis
says. "The fully 3-D solid mechanics model creates the earthquake, which shakes the seafloor and walls
of the bay and drives a fluid-mechanics event with the water that is sitting inside."

Through 3-D computer simulations conducted by the two UIUC graduate students, Mohamed
Abdelmeguid and Xiao Ma, the team found that a supershear strike-slip earthquake that occurs beneath
a narrow, shallow bay can trigger a massive tsunami. Even though the earthquake does not cause a

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major vertical displacement, the sides of the bay almost instantaneously interact with the substantial
horizontal displacements carried by the Mach fronts of the supershear rupture. The sides of the bay
then focus and direct the supershear rupture's energy, much like the walls of a bathtub direct bathwater
sloshed around by a child. After that initial mega-jolt sends water sloshing vertically, gravity takes over
and a tsunami is created.

"What is unique about our study is that we focused on extracting the fundamental mechanisms through
which a strike-slip fault system interacting with the boundaries of a narrow bay may possess enough
potential for triggering destructive tsunamis," Elbanna said. "We opted to simulate a very basic, planar
fault passing through a very simplified smooth-bottomed bay similar to a bathtub. Having this simplified
baseline model allows us to generalize to any place on the planet that may be at risk."

The computer simulations

generated by the team
matched the field evidence
that Synolakis had gathered.
For example, the simulation
suggested that a strike-slip
fault, in which one side
slides one direction and the
other side slides the
opposite way, would
The evolution of the tsunami over time, occurring in three distinct phases. generate an asymmetric
Credit: Courtesy of Ahmed Elbanna
tsunami wave with greater
inundation on one side of the fault than the other. Images of the damage at Palu show exactly that.

Furthermore, the model identified three distinct phases of the tsunami's motion: an instantaneous
dynamic phase right as the rupture crosses the bay; a co-seismic lagging phase that occurs as the
rupture has passed by, but the earthquake waves are still shaking an affected region; and a post-
seismic phase dominated by gravity as well as reflections and wave-focusing from the shore and bay
apex. Each may affect coastal areas differently.

"The tsunami risk from strike-slip faulting needs to be reevaluated," Rosakis says. He notes that similar
conditions exist along the San Andreas Fault in the Bay Area, as well as in the highly developed Gulf of
Aqaba that shares coastline with Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

The PNAS paper is titled "Anatomy of Strike-Slip Fault Tsunami-genesis." Co-authors include UIUC's
Abdelmeguid and Ma; Faisal Amlani (PhD '14) of USC; and Harsha S. Bhat of the École Normale
Supérieure in France. This research was funded by the NSF, the MCE Big Ideas Fund, and the Caltech
Terrestrial Hazard Observation and Reporting Center (THOR). This research is part of the Blue Waters
sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by the NSF, the State of Illinois, and the
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Blue Waters is a joint effort of UIUC and its National Center for
Supercomputing Applications.

WRITTEN BY CONTACT
Robert Perkins Robert Perkins
(626) 395‑1862
rperkins@caltech.edu

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