There are “important clues in the sediments [that reveal] why the 2004 Sumatran earthquake generated a deadly tsunami and the adjacent 2005 earthquake did not,” says seismologist Arthur Frankel in a report on the Science website.
Those clues could indeed help to predict “whether great earthquakes in other subduction zones will produce large tsunamis,” he says.
The paper provides “strong evidence” that sedimentary layers can “have a major influence on the behavior of [earthquakes] tsunamis,” agrees marine geophysicist Jian Lin.
