Introduction

Tsunami (sometimes spelled tunami) is a Japanese word that is used for large sea waves generated by earthquakes and other sudden mechanisms. The word means literally “long harbor wave” (Imamura, 1937, p. 123; Milne and Lee, 1939, p. 34; Darbyshire and Ishiguro, 1957), but because in Japan the largest destructive waves in harbors are those caused by earthquakes, the name has become attached to seismic sea waves. There is a long history of such waves. Nicholas H. Heck (1947) has published a list of 270 tsunamis starting with one at Potidea, Greece in 479 b.c. William H. Hobbs (1907) summarizes the report of the Greek historian Herodotus describing how this tsunami saved the Greek city from invaders. A Persian army was besieging Potidea when the sea retreated, exposing the seaside border of the city. When the Persians moved to attack across the exposed seabed, the subsequent inundation drowned many of them, setting up a Greek victory.

Ambraseys (1962) lists 141 tsunamis in the eastern Mediterranean starting in the second millenium b.c. Possibly the strongest of these was produced by the explosion of Santorin volcano in the Aegean Sea in the fifteenth Century b.c. The site is the present location of the island of Thera. This tsunami is believed to have brought about the collapse of the Minoan culture on the nearby island of Crete, whose north shore was extensively flooded (Marinatos, 1939). Thera has also been postulated as the site of ancient Atlantis (Galanopoulos, 1960).