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Tsunami Genesis of Strike-Slip Earthquakes Revealed in the 2018 Indonesian Palu Event

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Abstract

The devastating tsunami after the 2018 Indonesian Sulawesi-Palu strike-slip earthquake was a surprise because strike-slip faulting was a known phenomenon of primarily lateral movement of land, while tsunamis were believed to be caused by vertical movements of seafloor or landslides. Here we demonstrated how the strike-slip faulting could have pushed waters from outside and inside the Palu Bay to form a powerful tsunami in the Palu Bay. We constructed three earthquake inversions from seismographs, satellite radar and optical imagery, and used an open-source ocean circulation model to replicate the tsunami. Our experiments revealed that: (1) the southward horizontal displacement of deeper-water slopes along the Makassar coast generated a long-wave tsunami of 40 km, propagating southward into the Palu Bay and consisting with the two distinguished tsunami-peaks in the Pantoloan tide-record, twice higher than the local resonance waves; (2) the two types of tsunamis in the Mamuju tide-record—the “early arrival” tsunami and the late larger tsunami—were originated from the outside and inside sources; and (3) the eyewitness account of the whirlpool circulation in the Palu Bay could be explained by the horizontal strike-slip forcing of the two involved tectonic plates. The east plate was largely responsible for pushing the long-wave tsunami southward that inundated the Palu City and resulted in the devastation. Our findings suggest that the tsunami’s behavior of strike-slip earthquakes is more complex than previously thought and should be considered in future tsunami early warnings.

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Data Availability

All data sets used in this study are publicly available. InSAR data from https://asf.alaska.edu/data-sets/derived-data-sets/insar/insar-find-data/, and optical imagery data from https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/missions/sentinel-2. Raw seismic data were downloaded from https://ds.iris.edu/wilber3/find_event. The tide gauge data are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12847886.v1. Figures were prepared using Matlab (https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab.html), a licensed software to JPL.

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Acknowledgements

The research described here was conducted at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, under contracts with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The work of Prasetya was funded by The Tsunami Research Foundation of Indonesia and Chen was funded by National Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42074024). We thank Dwi Susanto for providing the early version of the tide data and Widjo Kongko for the bathymetric data.

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  1. Kejie Chen

    Present address: Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, China

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, 91109, USA

    Y. Tony Song

  2. Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, 91125, USA

    Kejie Chen

  3. Indonesian Tsunami Society (IATsI), Tsunami Research Foundation Indonesia, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

    Gegar Prasetya

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YS wrote the main manuscript text. KC conducted the earthquake modeling. GP contributed and examined the tsunami and survey data. All authors were involved in interpreting the results and contributed to improving the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Y. Tony Song.

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Song, Y.T., Chen, K. & Prasetya, G. Tsunami Genesis of Strike-Slip Earthquakes Revealed in the 2018 Indonesian Palu Event. Pure Appl. Geophys. 180, 1909–1923 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-023-03295-x

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