Bellambi’s tsunami
June 28, 2007
Section: News
A BULLI tsunami expert believes Northern Suburbs residents are too complacent when it comes to the risk of a giant wave hitting the region.
Ted Bryant, Associate Professor with the University of Wollongong's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said sufficient evidence existed to suggest that Bellambi Beach was once a tsunami site " and that history could easily repeat itself.
"People think large scale natural disasters happen in far away places " but the reality is that they have happened here in Australia," Professor Bryant said.
"We tend to think that if something like a tsunami hasn't happened since European settlement then it just hasn't happened " but the evidence suggests otherwise."
Professor Bryant joined a number of other researchers to investigate the site and then wrote an academic paper on his findings.
He said geographic formations and scars along coastal shelves pointed to a significant natural disaster.
"Scars from an underwater landslide found along a continental shelf off Bellambi Beach have us pretty convinced that a big wave hit this area around 4000 years ago," Professor Bryant said.
"The shelves along this area of the coast can be made unstable by a small earthquake or maybe a rise in the sea level - loading sediments onto the shelf puts pressure on it and weakens them.
"It wouldn't take a large earthquake to destabilise the shelf.
"The threat is still there, enough investigation has not been done in order to reduce the threat at all."
