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Tsunamis arrive on shores insidiously, often with little warning.
However, a promising NASA program uses a clever method to detect ocean disturbances as they occur, giving areas in the danger zone enough time to react.
The Guardian artificial intelligence system uses signals from GPS satellites affected by atmospheric disturbances to give us early warning, writes the BBC.
Meanwhile, Europe is developing its own system to monitor areas of interest to it, such as the Indian Ocean where France has territories.
The basic outlines of the idea have existed since the 1970s, but only recently, in our decade, has it been implemented.
Nature provided the opportunity to test the new system just one day after it began operating.
A tsunami in the open ocean is a wave only 10-50 centimeters high. Very small, but because it is spread over a large area, it moves a large mass of water. This causes "ripples" in the air above it and, in turn, affects the ionosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that is 100-200 kilometers above the Earth's surface.
"Ribbons" in the air cause disturbances in the ionosphere particles that affect the signal of GPS satellites. Infinitesimal delays can be recorded in real time and become an indicator that something is happening at sea.
The 2011 earthquake in Japan and the 2022 volcanic eruption in Tonga left a "fingerprint" in the ionosphere that experts say can be used to detect volcanic eruptions, large landslides, underground nuclear tests and missile launches.
To this day, tsunamis are detected by the rumblings of the open sea that ripple strongly after earthquakes.
The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula last July was the largest recorded on the planet in 15 years. The waves began to spread across the Pacific at speeds of 600 kilometers per hour.
In countries bordering the ocean, the alarm was sounded, with evacuation orders. In Japan alone, the country closest to the epicenter, at least 2 million people were ordered to evacuate their coasts.
Thanks to the new system, just 20 minutes after the Kamchatka earthquake, scientists knew that the tsunami was heading towards Hawaii, where it would arrive within 30 to 40 minutes.
In the end, the waves in Hawaii were a maximum of 1.7 meters and caused minor flooding and minor damage. Most of the energy from the violent earthquake was "dissipated" into the ocean and did not affect populated areas.
The system is not yet complete. In the future, it will allow not only automatic detection, but also automatic prediction of future tsunami behavior by automatically sending alerts regarding the final size of the waves, the point where they will hit the ground, and the time when this will happen.
There are also some limitations. The ionosphere “takes from a few minutes to tens of minutes to respond” to a tsunami, a time that can be devastating for coastal communities.
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