NOAA Sea to Sky: Education resource database

Watch. Explore. Discover. View the beauty and mystery of the ocean realm captured on video around the globe. Videos are organized into collections to help educators.

This resource collection from NOAA Education explores how tsunamis form and move and what NOAA does to forecast their movement. Tsunamis are just long waves — really long waves. But what is a wave? Sound waves, radio waves, even “the wave” in a stadium all have something in common with the waves that move across oceans. It takes an external force to start a wave, like dropping a rock into a pond or waves blowing across the sea. In the case of tsunamis, the forces involved are large — and their effects can be correspondingly massive.

The 6+ miles wide asteroid that hit Earth 66 million years ago, widely accepted to have wiped out nearly all the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the planet’s plant and animal species, also triggered a megatsunami with mile-high waves. Recent historical tsunamis pale in comparison with this globally catastrophic event, thought to be 30,000 times more initial energy than any recorded events. Watch this visualization of this tsunami as it spans the entire ocean.

Welcome to a virtual tour of the National Weather Service Forecast Office and Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi!

This webinar series was developed by NOAA's Regional Collaboration Network and Woods Hole Sea Grant at WHOI in response to the COVID school closures. With over 100 webinars featuring different NOAA experts/topics and a moderated question and answers session throughout so that students could get a peek at what our NOAA scientists do in all the various NOAA offices. They range in geography, content, and NOAA line office focus but are all designed to engage the students, answer their questions, and give them a glimpse of possible career options. Captions are available in English and Spanish. Many have ASL interpretation.

As Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano began to erupt on January 15, 2022, it sent more than tsunami waves across the Pacific Ocean — some forms of communications in the region were sent into the dark, too. The eruption broke an underwater communications cable, leaving most of the island nation without internet access and other forms of communication.

Imagine this: you are sitting on a beautiful beach enjoying a lovely day, when out of the blue an alarm blasts from your phone and reads “Tsunami warning.” Do you know where you would go and what to do? What if you aren’t in the U.S. and there are no alarms, would you know the signs of an approaching tsunami?

NOAA bathymetric data helps scientists more accurately model tsunami risk within Barry Arm.

On the afternoon of April 13, 2018, a large wave of water surged across Lake Michigan and flooded the shores of the picturesque beach town of Ludington, Michigan, damaging homes and boat docks, and flooding intake pipes. Thanks to a local citizen’s photos and other data, NOAA scientists reconstructed the event in models and determined this was the first ever documented meteotsunami in the Great Lakes caused by an atmospheric inertia-gravity wave.

Explore this interactive map of global tsunamis and their sources. By clicking on any tsunami event, you can access more information, including an overview of the tsunami, more information about the source, and the number of deaths. Get started with a helpful teacher guide.