08/07/2025
🌊 New Evidence of a Giant Tsunami in the Arctic! 🌊
Our team from Department of Paleoceanography IOPAN has just published striking evidence in the prestigious journal Scientific Reports that the Storegga tsunami, triggered by a massive undersea landslide off Norway, reached as far north as the Barents Sea (75°N)—deep into the Arctic Ocean.
🧪 In one of our sediment cores, we discovered an 18 cm thick layer of sandy mud containing older marine microfossils than the surrounding deposits and even traces of land plants! This unusual signature suggests a powerful and rapid event.
🌍 Using advanced tsunami simulations (in collaboration with Prof. Stein Bondevik of Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and Dr. Steven Gibbons from the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute), we reconstructed how this ancient megawave could have generated strong currents across the shallow Barents Sea—powerful enough to move and redistribute sediments on the ocean floor.
📜 This discovery rewrites part of the Arctic’s geological history and highlights just how far-reaching ancient natural disasters could be—even in the high north.
📖 The full story will be soon available here (full text on request):
Devendra, D., Łącka, M., Szymańska, N., Nethupul, H., Pawłowska, J., Szymczak-Żyła, M., Krajewska, M., De Silva, P., Bondevik, S., Gibbons, S.J., Zajączkowski, M. (2025). Expanding the footprint of the Storegga tsunami through new evidence from Arctic marine sediments. Scientific Reports.
