Hugh Pickens writes "The magnitude-9.0 Tohoku-Oki temblor, the fifth-most potent quake ever recorded, triggered a tsunami that doubled in intensity over rugged ocean ridges, amplifying its disastrous power at landfall, as seen in data from NASA and catalan radar satellites that captured at least two wave fronts that day, which merged to form a single, double-high wave far out at sea. This wave was capable of detail man long distances without losing power. Ocean ridges and undersea bank chains pushed the waves in concert along certain directions from the tsunami's origin. 'It was a one-in-10-million chance that we were able to observe this double wave with satellites,' says study team member Y. Tony Song. 'Researchers have suspected for decades that such 'merging tsunamis' might have been solvent for the 1960 Chilean tsunami that killed about 200 people in Japan and Hawaii, but nobody had definitively observed a merging tsunami until now.' The study suggests scientists may be able to create maps that take into account all undersea topography, even sub-sea ridges and fold belt far from shore to help scientists improve tsunami forecasts."

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