The conch's tale—A medieval tsunami at a Caribbean shellfishing hub
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Brian Atwater
USGS Emeriti
- Date & Time
- Location
- Online-only seminar via Microsoft Teams
- Summary
A single 14th-century catastrophe provides the only clear example of a tsunami from tectonic displacement of the hadal floor of the Puerto Rico Trench. Tsunami simulations tied to tsunami geology have identified the likely trigger as a great earthquake—either on a subduction thrust, or among grabens that corrugate the outer trench wall. New in this talk is evidence that the tsunami affected Native people on the inner trench rim. There, across centuries before the tsunami, shellfishers had landed over one million conch on a Caribbean Sea beach, where they extracted the meat and discarded the shells. The tsunami, within its first half hour, overwhelmed canoe landings, contaminated drinking water, and removed seagrass on which conch depend. These relatable effects tell a cautionary tale about Caribbean earthquake hazards.
Bob Halley mentored field teams that included geologists Michaela Spiske and Martitia Tuttle, geophysicist Uri ten Brink, and tsunami modelers Yong Wei, Hira Lodhi, and Haider Hasan. Photograph by Jennifer Doerr, NOAA