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High Water Mark

WHOI geophysicist Jian Lin points to the highest watermarks on the wall of a house destroyed by a devastating tsunami following the magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck off the coast of Chile on February 27, 2010. That tsunami reached several meters high in the village of Dichato. According to Lin, the quake occurred in an offshore zone that was under increased stress caused by a magnitude 9.5 quake in 1960. Lin and colleague Ross S. Stein of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., have studied the region extensively and alerted the scientific community to a build up of stress along the fault in a 2004 paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Lin plans to further study the recent Japan earthquake and tsunami.

(Photo by Professor Chao-Shing Lee, Taiwan National Ocean University)