A gigantic tsunami-unleashing earthquake that struck northern Chile 3,800 years ago wreaked such devastation on coastal populations, it took 1,000 years for humans to return to the shore, scientists say.
The ancient super-quake would have had a magnitude of around 9.5, and was so powerful it generated a tsunami that hurled boulders hundreds of meters inland in New Zealand, which is thousands of miles – and an entire ocean – away.
The discovery is evidenced by uplifted land structures (aka
littoral deposits) and samples of marine rocks, shells, and sea life washed far ashore by tsunami waves into the higher stretches of
Chile's Atacama Desert. It serves as a grim warning of the destructive potential of major tsunamigenic earthquakes that may have previously escaped our notice.
"We found evidence of marine sediments and a lot of beasties that would have been living quietly in the sea before being thrown inland,"
says geologist and tsunami specialist James Goff from the University of New South Wales, Australia.
"And we found all these very high up and a long way inland so it could not have been a storm that put them there."
