Satellite data shows that the tsunami caused by the giant Russian earthquake broke the rules

On July 29, 2025, the sixth largest earthquake on record in the world struck Russia, triggering a tsunami whose waves reached the West Coast of the United States. Data from an unexpected source – space – have shed unexpected light on this oceanic interaction.

The Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, which aims to survey the planet's surface waters, has documented the first high-resolution track of a large tsunami region from space, a team of researchers claims in a study published last November in the journal The Seismic Record. This information can shed light on how tsunami waves move and potentially impact coastlines.

“[We] “We have been analyzing SWOT data for more than two years to understand different processes in the ocean such as small eddies, and we never imagined that we would be lucky enough to catch a tsunami,” Angel Ruiz Angulo, co-author of the study and a physical oceanographer at the University of Iceland, said in a statement from the Seismological Society of America.

Your tsunami nightmares are inaccurate

When you think of a tsunami, you probably imagine a terrifying wall of water coming forward all at once. In fact, since the wavelength of large tsunamis is much greater than the depth of the ocean, researchers usually consider them “non-dispersive.” In other words, scientists expect the wave to move as one cohesive unit and not break up into a number of propagating waves. However, SWOT data revealed that the tsunami caused by the 8.8 magnitude Russia earthquake did not spread as a single wave, but rather as a complex movement of interacting waves.

This calls into question the idea that large tsunami waves are not dispersed, Ruiz Angulo explained. In fact, he and his colleagues note that computer models of tsunamis that account for dispersion fit better with real satellite data than do standard models.

“The main implication of this observation for tsunami modellers is that we are missing something in the models we are used to running,” he added. “This 'extra' variation could represent that the main wave may be modified by background waves as it approaches some coast. We will need to measure this excess of dissipated energy and evaluate whether it has an effect that was not previously considered.”

Accurate estimates of the Russian earthquake

The team combined satellite measurements with data from the Deep Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami (DART) buoys on the path of the tsunami.

“I view SWOT data as new glasses,” Ruiz Angulo explained. “Before, with DARTs, we could only see tsunamis at specific points in the vastness of the ocean. There were other satellites before, but they only saw a thin line across the tsunami in the best-case scenario. Now, with SWOT, we can capture a swath of about 120 kilometers [75 miles] Vast, with unprecedented high-resolution sea surface data.

However, the buoys helped improve the original estimates of the earthquake. The team found that tsunami arrival times estimated through previous simulations did not match real-world data from the two DART tide gauges. As such, the researchers took another look at the original earthquake by using the buoy information in a type of analysis called inversion. This approach suggests that the rupture extended further south than researchers thought and was about 250 miles (400 kilometers), which is also strikingly longer than other computer models have suggested.

Since the horrific 2011 9.0 magnitude earthquake in Japan, co-author Diego Melgar's lab and others have been trying to incorporate DART information into inversions. However, because the models needed to simulate DARTs differ significantly from those needed for data from solid Earth, this doesn't happen all the time, Melgar explained. “But, as shown again here, it's really important that we mix as many types of data as possible.”

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