Preventing disaster
An earthquake expert who saw the warning signs
Phil Cummins heard about the Sumatran tsunami in much the same way as the rest of the unaffected world: by flipping on the TV. But when the 44-year-old American seismologist first saw the reports at his Canberra, Australia, home on December 26, his sinking recognition may well have been unique. "As soon as they said 'tsunami, Sumatra,' " he recalls, "I knew exactly what it was."
Come again? The Indian Ocean, we were told, was the last place you'd expect a disaster like this. Some 90 percent of tsunamis--whether kicked off by underwater earthquakes, volcanoes, or landslides--occur in the Pacific. But Cummins, who works for the Australian geological agency, had recently stumbled upon evidence that a Sumatran tsunami was all but inevitable. And he'd begun making the case to expand the international tsunami warning system to the region--a move that could have saved tens of thousands of lives.
Hindsight. Along with Australian and Indonesian colleagues, Cummins first raised the idea of a warning system for the Indian Ocean at an October 2003 meeting of the United Nations body, known as ITSU, that coordinates tsunami warnings for the Pacific. That proposal was based on relatively modest tsunamis that originated near Java in 1977 and 1994, Cummins says, and it wasn't until later that he discovered the potential for a much more severe event near Sumatra. "In retrospect, maybe I should have pursued it more urgently," Cummins says. "But even I wasn't 100 percent convinced, and I had no way of knowing that it was going to be now rather than 200 years from now."
That initial proposal for a warning system was met with interest, Cummins says, and he joined a working group set up to study the idea. "I volunteered to start looking at general hazards for the Indian Ocean" beyond Java, says Cummins. "And that's when I started seeing these signs" that the subduction zone that set off the December 26 tsunami had the potential to cause a major disaster. Surveying scientific papers, he noticed that conditions along the Sunda Arc--where a relatively young chunk of the Earth's crust is squeezing itself beneath the larger Eurasian plate--closely mirrored known sources of major tsunamis in the Pacific. And he found references to at least two previous major earthquakes along that subduction zone, one in 1833 and another in 1861. "I think you could see [the potential] just by looking at the geology," Cummins says. "I don't know why no one had made the connection to tsunami before."
Part of the reason Cummins took notice has as much to do with his biography as with his training. A native of southwest Florida, Cummins started out as a physicist. During graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley, he "just sort of gravitated over to geophysics," he says, and moved to Australia as a postdoctoral fellow in 1989 to study the deep structure of the Earth. It wasn't until 1997, though, when he moved to a geology institute in Japan, that Cummins started taking a personal interest in earthquakes. Along with his wife and three children, Cummins says, he ended up living at what had been the epicenter of an earthquake that devastated Tokyo in 1923. "I came to realize that we were sitting right on top of the rupture area that caused a tsunami in that area," he recalls. "It was a funny place for a seismologist to live." It was also the kind of place that would get a father thinking about tsunamis and the devastation they can cause, an interest Cummins maintained when the family moved back to Australia in June 2002.
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