Earthquakes hastened sea rise in Pacific islands by sinking the ground
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Tutuila, the largest island in the US territory of American Samoa
Peto Laszlo/Alamy
The Samoan Islands are sinking faster after earthquakes caused a deformation in Earth’s mantle beneath the island chain. Projections of sea level rise that fail to account for this additional sinking substantially underestimate the risk of flooding on the islands.
In 2009, a pair of magnitude-8 earthquakes created a tsunami that killed nearly 200 people and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages on the Samoan Islands and the island of Tonga. The earthquakes also released stress on…
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