title: Tsunami: a history of the term and of scientific understanding of the phenomenon in Japanese and Western culture.
abstract: In the past few years we have unfortunately had several reminders of the ability of a particular type of ocean wave--a tsunami--to devastate coastal areas. The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, in particular, was one of the largest natural disasters of past decades in terms of the number of people killed. The name of this phenomenon, tsunami, is possibly the only term that has entered the physics lexicon from Japanese. We use Japanese and Western sources to document historical tsunami in Europe and Japan, the birth of the scientific understanding of tsunami, and how the Japanese term came to be adopted in English.
authors.affiliation: Instituto Andaluz de Ciencias de la Tierra, CSIC-Universidad de Granada, Campus Fuentenueva, E-18071 Granada, Spain. julyan@lec.csic.es
authors.forename: Julyan H E
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Cartwright
authors.forename: Hisami
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Nakamura
mesh_terms: D004190:Disasters / Q000266:history*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D007564:Japan; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D055871:Tidal Waves / Q000266:history*