Wednesday 16 / October / 2024
Muscat: 15-meter high waves that pushed boulders the weight of a Leopard tank inland: This is more or less how one can imagine the tsunami that hit the coast of the Sultanate about 1,000 years ago, as concluded by a recent study.
The findings show how urgently the region needs a well-functioning early warning system. But even then, coastal residents would have a maximum of 30 minutes to get to safety in a similar catastrophe. The study will be published in the journal "Marine Geology", but is already available online http://paleoseismicity.org/quaternary-sea-level-change-along-the-coastline-of-oman/.
A natural event of similar magnitude would have devastating consequences today, warn researchers at the University of Bonn, Germany.
Prof. Dr. habil. Gösta Hoffmann from the University of Bonn (Germany) who has been teaching as a fly-in professor at the Applied Geosciences Department, German University of Technology in Oman (GUtech), has published a scientific paper along with his colleagues from the universities of Bonn, Jena, Freiburg and RWTH Aachen in the international scientific journal ‘Marine Geology’.
The coasts of the Sultanate are repeatedly struck by tsunamis, most recently in 2013. Even with the most severe of these in recent times, the Makran event in 1945, the damage remained comparatively low. Back then, the tidal wave reached a height of three meters.
Scientists have now discovered evidence of a tsunami which is likely to have been much more powerful, with waves of up to 15 meters height.
