In Search of Ancient Tsunamis: A Researcher's Travels, Tools, and Techniques

"This is the story of a journey. It begins in a small, slightly overfull office in Sydney, Australia and ends in the unremitting heat of the Atacama Desert coast in Chile. To get from A to B though is no straight line, it takes many geographical and anecdotal tangents. The journey is one of discovery. It describes my part in the emergence of a new and extremely violent science - unravelling the mysteries of past tsunamis. There are two sides to the story of every tsunami - the careful piecing together of the physical evidence for these catastrophic events and the patient assembly of the jigsaw puzzle that often reflects the less tangible signs, the human story. After all, the only reason we really care about tsunamis is because they catch us by surprise, destroy our coastal communities, and kill us. The past couple of decades have seen 1000s of unnecessary tsunami-related deaths but we continue to believe that we can control nature, control this beast. It is only when you delve into the past that you start to realise that not only have tsunamis been even bigger than we have experienced in living memory, but that they have also destroyed coastal communities, and just like today we never seem to truly learn from these experiences. In the absence of this huge back catalogue of human folly we continue to make the same mistakes. In this case the past is our key to the future -the more we know about the past, the better prepared we will be for the future. The trick is to know what you are looking for; and this is the start of that journey"--