Abstract

Along with being one of the most populated regions of the world, Indonesia has one of the highest natural disaster rates worldwide. One such natural disaster that Indonesia is particularly prone to are tsunamis. Tsunamis are primarily caused by earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and debris flows. To effectively allocate resources and create emergency plans we need an understanding of the risk factors of the region. Understanding the source events of destructive tsunamis of the past are critical to understanding the these risk factors. We expand upon previous work focusing on earthquake-generated tsunamis to consider landslide-generated tsunamis. Using Bayesian inference and modern scientific computing we construct a posterior distribution of potential landslide sources based on anecdotal data of historically observed tsunamis. After collecting 30,000 samples we find a landslide source event provides a reasonable match to our anecdotal accounts. However, viable landslides may be on the edge of what is physically possible. Future work creating a coupled landslide-earthquake model may account for the weaknesses with having a solely landslide or earthquake source event.

Degree

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Mathematics

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