The tsunami surprised the experts. Now, they are starting to understand why.

On the August day an earthquake struck near the South Sandwich Islands in the South Atlantic last year, scientists knew something strange was going on.

“Maybe within 20 to 25 minutes or so, we realized something strange was going on,” said Stuart Weinstein, deputy director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Algorithms that distinguish earthquakes, he said, were failing. A tsunami event would send waves traveling around the world.

Now, new research indicates that a subtle earthquake – larger than initial estimates – sent this tsunami from islands east of the southern tip of South America all the way to Alaska.

A study published Tuesday in Geophysical Research Letters reported that the hidden earthquake, which occurred beneath remote ice-covered islands, was initially unnoticed because it was part of a complex chain of earthquakes.

Tsunami watchers that day were on alert after the earthquake, which measured 7.5 on the Richter scale, ruptured 29 miles underground. But a deep earthquake of this size is unlikely to produce a powerful tsunami, so they were surprised by the size of the waves it created.

“We were immediately aware of the tsunami,” said Summer Ohlendorf, a science officer at the US National Tsunami Warning Center, who was not part of the new research. “It was a little bigger than expected based on earthquake parameters.”

The new study says there were actually five earthquakes over several minutes, including a shallower 8.2-magnitude earthquake not identified by early reports that likely caused the tsunami. The analysis could help spur improvements in earthquake warning systems that are better responsible for unusual and complex events.

The earthquake produced waves more than two feet wide at the nearest tidal scale, before spreading around the world with smaller impacts.

“It was powerful enough that it spread around the Southern Ocean and around all the major ocean basins,” Weinstein said. “It was recorded by sea level stations all over the world.”

He said there are no hard and fast rules about when a tsunami can cause flooding because it depends a lot on the nature of the affected coast. But when waves exceed 1 meter (3 feet), that’s when you “have to worry about flood risk,” he said.

The seismic signals for all of these events overlapped with each other because they occurred in close succession, said Zhi Jia, a seismologist at Caltech and lead author of the study. The initial earthquake masked the stronger and slower earthquake, which was the third in the series.

“The third is very special. An event as massive, hidden, as slow as the third sub-event can lead to an underestimation of the tsunami,” he said.

The South Sandwich Islands, a British Overseas Territory, are a chain of small, volcanically formed land masses more than 1,000 miles from the southern tip of South America. About half of the islands’ landscape is permanently covered with ice.

Nobody lives on the islands permanently and there are no hotels on them, but researchers and tourists can visit and even marry there, according to the territorial government. You will have more penguins and seals than you will as wedding guests.

The earthquake caused the islands to vibrate.

“If the earthquake itself occurred in densely populated areas… it would probably be more destructive,” Jia said.

Researchers said the island does not have equipment to measure seismic events.

“It’s so far out, it’s very difficult to study earthquakes like that. There’s not a lot of data available to look at,” said Jeremy Maurer, assistant professor of earth sciences at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

To study what happened in detail, Caltech researchers built a new algorithm that was able to split the earthquake into five different earthquake events.

The researchers found that the largest earthquake – which lasted for more than 3 minutes and represented about 70 percent of the total energy emitted – was masked by other seismic waves.

When the researchers looked at the longer wavelengths, which indicate a slower earthquake, they were able to see more clearly what happened.

The difference between a magnitude 8.2 earthquake and a magnitude 7.5 earthquake is significant, with about 10 times more energy released than previously? , according to the US Geological Survey’s volume calculation.

“That’s a big difference,” Weinstein said.

Shallow earthquakes have more potential for tsunamis.

“The deeper the earthquake, the less impact it has on the surface,” he said.

Weinstein, who was not involved in the research, said the new analysis was comprehensive and valuable for understanding what happened more accurately. Jia said future earthquake and tsunami monitoring systems must be modified to more accurately deal with unusually complex earthquakes.

Weinstein added that the research supports arguments for establishing a seismic monitoring system in the South Atlantic, something that is being studied by a group of experts within the United Nations Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

“We also need to boost the amount of equipment we have,” Weinstein said. “We need more seismic information” from the South Sandwich Islands, including stations to take sea level measurements and buoys that measure pressure changes as tsunamis pass from the ocean floor.

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