Nearly 1 billion people globally live within 10 km of a coastline. Tsunamis can pose a threat to those who live near the coastline in tectonically active areas.  In this research I aim to better understand tsunami hazards, and possible mechanisms that could lead to unexpected tsunami heights such as those seen in the 2018 Palu earthquake. I conduct this research by running dynamic rupture models with the FaultMod (Barall, 2009) finite element software and using the outputs from those models as inputs in the finite volume geophysical flow code Geoclaw (Berger & LeVeque 2023).

Tsunamis are associated with vertical mass movements of water and are often tied to regions dominated by reverse or thrust faulting (i.e. subduction zones).  It is not unheard of for tsunamis to accompany large strike-slip events such as the 2018 Palu earthquake in Indonesia which was followed by a tsunami with wave heights of ~1.5 meters. Another region characterized by strike-slip faulting with a long written record of tsunamis is the Sea of Marmara of the coast of Turkey. In 1999 the North Anatolian fault ruptured, increasing the stress on the offshore fault segments. In this research I run dynamic rupture simulations for this fault system and investigate which mechanism, such as possible inelastic yielding, may account for the tsunami history in this region.