Record‐breaking height for 8000‐year‐old tsunami in the North Atlantic

Abstract

One of the largest Holocene sub‐marine slides mapped on Earth is the Storegga slide offshore Norway [ Bugge , 1987] (Figure 1). Approximately 3500 km 3 material slid out and generated a huge tsunami dated to about 7300 14 C yr BP [ Bondevik et al ., 1997a], or ca 8150 calendar years BP. The tsunami is known from onshore deposits in Norway [ Bondevik et al ., 1997a], on the Faroe Islands [ Grauert et al ., 2001], and in Scotland [ Dawson et al ., 1993]. Of these, the tsunami deposits in western Norway reaches the highest elevation, indicating a runup of 10–12 m. In this article, we demonstrate that at the Shetland Islands between Norway and Scotland (Figure 1), this tsunami reached onshore heights at least 20 m above the sea level of that time.