How are tsunamis tracked

How are tsunamis tracked?

In 1965, after a tsunami hit the pacific coastline in the United States, a warning sytem was created. The headquarters for this is known as the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) located in Honolulu, Hawaii. Its responsibility is to issue warnings on any tsunami like activity to any Pacific Ocean emergency centers. Although the risk of tsunamis are possible in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the Mediterrean, Caribbean, and Black Seas, there are no warning systems for these oceans!

The first step of a tsunami warning system is keeping track of seismic waves and the sea level. The next step is to compare all data on any previous tsunamis that may have happened in the area before.The last step is to make sure there is good communication between monitoring stations, the warning centre and at-risk states.

A good example of needing tsunami warning systems all over the world is when the tsunami hit Sri Lanka in December 2004. By chance, this tsunami was recorded by the Jason satellite that was flying over the Indian Ocean. Scientists did not know that the satallites could pick up low wave amplitudes of the tsunamis until that day. The satallite is designed for ocean research so it was not able to send warning before the tsunami hit Sri Lanka. This tsunami was caused by a major shift in a well known fault lnecausing increased pressure on other parts of the fault. This tsunami had the same amount of energy as 23,000 atomic bombs and caused 150,000 people to die in one day.