NSF Award
9901771
9901771<br/>Atwater<br/><br/>This award provides funds to support a 6-month research visit by Dr. Brian F. Atwater, Western Earthquake Hazards Team, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), University of Washington, for collaboration with Dr. Kenji Satake, Geological Survey of Japan (GSJ), at Tsukuba. These two scientists will collaborate on two projects about a January 1700 tsunami in Japan and the American earthquake at Cascadia that probably caused it. The first is the writing of a book about these events and the series of discoveries that linked them. The book will be written in English plain enough to reach a broad audience of American and Japanese citizens concerned with earthquake and tsunami hazards. The second collaborative project may clarify earthquake and tsunami hazards in the United States by revising the estimated size of the 1700 tsunami in Japan.<br/>The immediate objective of the research is to learn the position of sea level in 1700 at several sites in Japan. These sites have been subsiding so rapidly in the past 50-100 years that the documented level of the 1700 tsunami in Japan, if referenced to modern sea level, may be too low by a meter or more. Both projects will implement two U.S.-Japan agreements to use tsunamis and coastal geology in assessing earthquake hazards. One of these accords, the U.S.-Japan Earthquake Disaster Mitigation Partnership, is part of the Common Agenda for Cooperation in Global Perspective, while the other was a recently signed annex to the new Memorandum of Understanding between the USGS and GSJ. The project will be beneficial to U.S. engineers, public officials, and others to justify earthquake-resistant design, tsunami-inundation zoning, and other public-safety measures at the Cascadia subduction zone. In Japan, the project may encourage the use of coastal geology to reduce losses from future earthquakes. This project is supported under the Science Fellowship Program between the National Science Foundation and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.<br/>***
