High Resolution Analysis of the 1960 Chilean Tsunami at Crescent City, California

Crescent City, California is particularly vulnerable to tsunamis. Since 1938, 24 tsunamis have been recorded and three have caused significant damage, most recently in November 2006. The largest and most deadly of these, the tsunami generated by the 1964 Alaskan earthquake, was discussed in detail by Dengler and Magoon at the previous Solutions conference. This paper discusses a ‘new' source of data for assessing the risk to Crescent City, i.e. digitized high-speed gauge records from the second most damaging tsunami that followed the May 22, 1960 Chilean earthquake. These newly digitized records will allow spectral and statistical analyses so that the evolution of spectral characteristics with time can be studied and questions of tsunami resonance and the partitioning of the energy into wave types can be better understood.