Global tsunami hazard and exposure due to large co-seismic slip

Tsunamis are infrequent events with the power to cause massive loss of life, large economic losses, and cascading effects such as destruction of critical facilities. Historical tsunamis and paleotsunami evidence indicates indirectly that massive megathrust earthquakes leads to the majority of the losses due to tsunamis. There is a need to quantify the tsunami hazard from megathrust events in order to compare tsunamis with other natural hazards on a global level, as previous attempts have been lacking. Here, we determine the earthquake induced tsunami hazard for a return period of 500 years using both a deterministic scenario based approach as well as a probabilistic tsunami hazard assessment method (PTHA). The resulting hazard level for a set of selected areas in South and South East Asia are compared quantitatively for both methods. The comparison demonstrate that the accuracy of the analysis is rather rough, which is expected given the global character of the analysis. Globally, the exposed elements at risk such as population, produced capital, and nuclear power plants are determined for each nation affected. It is shown that populous Asian countries account for the largest absolute number of people living in tsunami prone areas, more than 50% of the total exposed people live in Japan. Smaller nations like Macao and the Maldives are among the most exposed by population count. Exposed nuclear power plants are limited to Japan, China, India, Taiwan, and USA.