An international satellite mission detected the unique contours of a tsunami that sloshed within the steep walls of a fjord in Greenland in September 2023.
An international satellite mission detected the unique contours of a tsunami that sloshed within the steep walls of a fjord in Greenland in September 2023. Triggered by a massive rockslide, the tsunami generated a seismic rumble that reverberated around the world for nine days. A research team that included seismologists, geophysicists, and oceanographers recently reported on the event after a year of analyzing data.
The SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite, a collaboration between NASA and France’s CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), collected water elevation measurements in Dickson Fjord on September 17, 2023, the day after the initial rockslide and tsunami. The data were compared with measurements made under normal conditions a few weeks prior, on August 6, 2023.
In this data visualization, orange and yellow indicate higher-than-normal water levels, and purple and black indicate lower levels. For context, water elevation measurements are overlaid on an image of the fjord acquired by the OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on the Landsat 9. The data suggest that water levels along the north side of the fjord were as much as 1.2 meters (4 feet) higher than on the south side at some points.
Read more at: NASA Earth Observatory
Photo Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using SWOT data provided by the SWOT science team, Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey, and Digital Elevation Model data from ArcticDEM. Story by Andrew Wang, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, adapted for NASA Earth Observatory.
