Topocaustically driven similarity in long-distance tsunami runup along a coast

We have presumed that tsunamis causing catastrophic damage would exhibit different runup heights at a particular location depending on how and where the underlying earthquakes occurred. Thus, existing studies have centered on one-to-one correspondences between runup on a location and multiple tsunami-generation conditions. However, spatial characteristics of tsunami risk along a coast occurred by tsunamis is still unknown. Herein, we present the results of a statistical analysis of numerical experiments on the spatial distributions of maximum tsunami wave and runup heights along the coasts of Korea and North America. Unlike our expectation, far-field tsunamis that occur with different properties and at different locations result in statistically the same spatial wave height and runup distributions along a coast, regardless of their epicenter locations and magnitudes. The inter-similarity of spatial runup distributions along a coast indicates that long-distance tsunami hotspots are topocaustically predetermined, less relying on the tsunami-generation conditions.