Scientist Carrie Garrison-Laney from the Washington Sea Grant will illustrate why the coastlines of Washington are so vulnerable to tsunamis at a lecture sponsored by the Quimper Geological Society at 4 p.m. on Feb. 29 at the Port Townsend High School auditorium.
Garrison-Laney is a tsunami and coastal resilience liaison with the Washington Sea Grant. Her research has included identifying and dating paleotsunami deposits in California and Washington, the numerical modeling of tsunamis and using intertidal diatom ecology to study past tsunami inundation events and sea level change.
The longest geologic record of past tsunamis is at Discovery Bay, 10 miles southwest of Port Townsend. At least nine tsunami deposits dating back 2,500 years are preserved as layers of fine sand in otherwise peaty tidal-marsh deposits, whereas only five Cascadia earthquakes were recorded in the estuaries of southwest Washington during that same time span.
Learn more about Washington’s history of tsunamis as well as the new high-resolution tsunami modeling at the lecture.
