Tsunami Historical Series: Kamchatka, Russia - 2025

On July 30, 2025, the sixth-largest earthquake ever recorded struck offshore of the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia at 11:24 in the morning (29 July 23:24 UTC). Its 8.8 magnitude also made it the largest earthquake since the M9.0 earthquake that struck offshore of Japan in 2011, and like that earthquake produced a tsunami hazardous to both nearby and distant coastlines. As the tsunami spread through the Pacific Ocean over the next day-and-a-half, countries in Central and South America and several Pacific Island nations were issued guidance on the hazards. For the United States, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) issued a Tsunami Warning (1 m or more, evacuation recommendation) for Hawaii and Tsunami Advisories (0.3 to 1 m, clear the beach recommendation) for Guam and American Samoa. Tsunami Warnings were also issued for the western Aleutian Islands and northern California, and Tsunami Advisories were issued for the eastern Aleutian Islands, Alaska Peninsula, southern Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California south of Mendocino.

As expected, Russia received the largest tsunami waves, with one run-up measurement reaching 19 m (more than 60 ft.). Outside of Russia the greatest amplitudes were in Hawaii, with Kahului, Maui recording over 1.7 m (more than 5.5 ft.) and the other main Hawaiian islands all recording more than 1 m (over 3 ft.). Other locations with comparable run-up values included Japan and Chile, (1.3 m), northern California (1.2 m), the Galapagos Islands (1.0 m), and Midway Atoll and American Samoa (just under 1 m).

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) creates animations of tsunamis with the same tool that it uses to determine tsunami hazards in real time: the Real-Time Forecasting of Tsunamis (RIFT) forecast model. The RIFT model takes earthquake information as input and calculates how the waves move through the world’s oceans, predicting their speed, wavelength, and amplitude. This animation shows these values through the simulated motion of the waves as they travel through the Pacific Ocean. You can see the distance between successive wave crests (wavelength) and color indicates their height (half-amplitude). More importantly, the model shows what happens when these tsunami waves strike land. The animation begins with all coastlines covered by blue dots. The blue color indicates normal sea level, but as the tsunami waves reach them they will change color to represent the height of the waves coming ashore, and often these values are higher than the waves in the deeper waters offshore. The color scheme is based on PTWC’s warning criteria, with blue-to-green representing no hazard (less than 30 cm or ~1 ft.), yellow-to-orange indicating low hazard with a clear-the-beach recommendation (30 to 100 cm or ~1 to 3 ft.), light red-to-bright red indicating flooding hazard and recommending evacuation (1 to 3 m or ~3 to 10 ft.), and dark red indicating a severe hazard possibly justifying a second-tier evacuation (greater than 3 m or ~10 ft.).

Toward the end of this simulated 30 hours of activity the wave animation transitions to the “energy map” of a mathematical surface representing the maximum rise in sea-level on the open ocean caused by the tsunami, a pattern that indicates that the kinetic energy of the tsunami was not distributed evenly across the oceans but instead forms a highly directional “beam” such that the tsunami was far more severe in the middle of the “beam” of energy than on either side. This pattern generally correlates with the coastal impacts; note how those coastlines directly in the “beam” are hit by larger waves than those to either side of it.

You can also view a YouTube version of this animation.

USGS/NEIC Finite Fault Model

NOAA/NCEI Tsunami Database