This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: On July 29, 2025, at 23:24 Universal Time, a long stretch of seafloor off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula was thrust upward. The magnitude 8.8 earthquake was the largest on Earth since the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, according to the U.S.
Geological Survey, and within minutes a tsunami was spreading across the Pacific. Warnings went out from Japan to Chile. On Shumshu, in the Kuril Islands, the water splashed up to about 19 meters (62 feet) high.
Tsunamis are where my own research began, with a doctoral thesis on their mathematics, and since 2018 I have studied the tsunami hazard of real coastlines with Amin Rashidi of the University of Tehran, who led this study. When this tsunami crossed the ocean, we asked a simple question: How much of what the ocean recorded can the earthquake alone explain? With Mohammad Mokhtari, we give the answer in the journal Natural Hazards.
Our judges were six stations of the DART network, which the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps in the deep Pacific to detect tsunamis. Each station has a pressure sensor on the seafloor that feels the weight of the water above it and, therefore, the height of the sea surface.
A buoy at the surface relays the readings by satellite. When a tsunami passes, the station switches from one reading every 15 minutes to one every minute or faster. The station nearest the source, whose sensor sits 5.8 kilometers (3.6 miles) down, saw the first waves 27 minutes after the earthquake and then a crest of 85 centimeters (33 inches), the second-largest reading in the history of the network after the Tohoku tsunami of 2011.
The farthest station, southeast of Japan, saw the waves arrive after 144 minutes, only 8 centimeters (3 inches) high. Nothing in our simulation was adjusted to the buoy records. We started from the rupture model that the U.S.
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