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A new study into a giant tsunami last year in Alaska shows it could have easily killed lots of people. Researchers say the massive wave near Juneau was triggered by a landslide and swept an area frequently visited by boats and cruise ships carrying thousands of passengers. NPR's Rebecca Hersher reports.
REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: The tsunami happened in a picturesque fjord called Tracy Arm last August at 5:30 a.m.
JACQUELINE CAPLAN-AUERBACH: The fact that it took place at 5:30 in the morning was really just unimaginably lucky.
HERSHER: Jacqueline Caplan-Auerbach is a seismologist and one of the authors of the new study, which was published in the journal Science.
CAPLAN-AUERBACH: Had this happened several hours later, it's far more likely there would have been boats in the area when that huge tsunami came down.
HERSHER: And if boats had been in the fjord, it could have been deadly, the new study finds. Scientists reconstructed what happened. There's a glacier at the end of the fjord, and they found that a massive landslide next to it triggered the tsunami. The tsunami sent water more than 1,500 feet up the steep sides of the fjord. The water was carrying chunks of ice, trees and other debris.
CAPLAN-AUERBACH: It's really scary to imagine it.
HERSHER: Such landslides near glaciers are getting more likely because climate change is causing glaciers to melt, which makes the areas around them less stable. In fact, some communities in Iceland and Greenland have already been forced to move because of the threat posed by tsunamis that are touched off by landslides. Caplan-Auerbach says last summer's tsunami near Juneau is a wake-up call about the risks for Alaska.
CAPLAN-AUERBACH: Nobody had eyes on this area as a place where we expected failure, and there are undoubtedly many places like this.
HERSHER: Studying last summer's tsunami could also help scientists predict when and where such tsunamis will happen in the future because, in retrospect, there were some signs that the landslide was about to happen.
CAPLAN-AUERBACH: There were tiny, tiny, tiny earthquakes that were probably the first sign that that area was going to fail.
HERSHER: But she says a lot more research is needed to measure and understand such earthquakes.
Rebecca Hersher, NPR News.
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