Journal article
Observations of the seiche that shook the world
- Abstract:
- On September 16th, 2023, an anomalous 10.88 mHz seismic signal was observed globally, persisting for 9 days. One month later an identical signal appeared, lasting for another week. Several studies have theorized that these signals were produced by seiches which formed after two landslide-generated mega-tsunamis in an East Greenland fjord. This theory is supported by seismic inversions, and analytical and numerical modeling, but no direct observations have been made. Here, we present primary observations of this phenomenon using data from the Surface Water Ocean Topography mission. By ruling out other oceanographic processes, we validate the seiche theory of previous authors and independently estimate its initial amplitude at 7.9 m using Bayesian machine learning and seismic data. This study demonstrates the value of satellite altimetry for studying fast oceanic processes and extreme events, while also highlighting the need for specialized methods to address the altimetric data’s limitations, namely temporal sparsity. These data and approaches will help in understanding future unseen extremes driven by climate change.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 5.6MB, Terms of use)
-
(Preview, Supplementary materials, pdf, 12.3MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41467-025-59851-7
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Communications More from this journal
- Volume:
- 16
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 4777
- Publication date:
- 2025-06-03
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-05-07
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
2041-1723
- Language:
-
English
- Pubs id:
-
2123139
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2123139
- Deposit date:
-
2025-05-12
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Monahan et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2025. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record