Uncovering historical tsunamis with Colonial Caribbean
Brian Atwater, Affiliate Professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, utilised AM’s Colonial Caribbean digital collection to delve into historical geological events. His research focuses on the potential impact of a pre-Columbian tsunami on Anegada in the British Virgin Islands. Highlighting the value of the Colonial Caribbean collection, Professor Atwater described his work as “sleuthing a pre-Columbian tsunami with clues from Colonial Caribbean.”
Professor Atwater’s important field of interest, as he describes it, is that of ‘trying to clarify earthquake and tsunami potential in the north-east Caribbean’. Working with colleagues from Canada, France, Germany, Puerto Rico, Pakistan and the United States, he has been focusing on assessing the possible tsunami threat to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands from the Puerto Rico Trench, looking to use the history of the region as a natural warning system for coastal hazards.
Professor Atwater’s current work follows on from previous research he has undertaken both in Japan, and on Indian Ocean shores following the disaster of December 2004. His approach to his research embodies the idea ‘that Earth history can overlap with human history, and it gets all the more interesting when it does’, both disciplines being interested in ‘the same issues of evidence, and why was something recorded’. Professor Atwater’s recent work in this area bears out this interest in pursuing historical investigation alongside his scientific research.
There is a fascinating relationship between his study of the historical record in British Colonial Office documents of the nineteenth century, digitised in Colonial Caribbean, and his field research in Anegada, one of the British Virgin Islands, which, he discovered, has spectacular evidence for a catastrophic flood from the sea during the last centuries before Columbus.
Access to the Colonial Office documents has helped figure out which boulders were moved by a Caribbean tsunami during the last centuries before Columbus
The value of the Colonial Office papers lies in helping to illuminate ‘what transpired on Anegada that could affect the geological record of a pre-Columbian tsunami’ and Professor Atwater’s intriguing findings have come to centre on limestone boulders and coral heads on the island that he believes to have been transported by a giant pre-Columbian wave, and then in some instances used by islanders to form up to around 200km of limestone walls.
Key documents to which Professor Atwater has had access through Colonial Caribbean include the work of an individual named Dr. John Stobo, whose estimates of land use on the island of Anegada include detailed tallies of acreage and productivity in 1815 and 1823. These offer clues on land modification and wall-building and are, according to Professor Atwater, ‘the earliest things that we have that tell us that some large fraction of that island, Anegada, was devoted to pasture. That was very helpful to see that confirmed’.
Professor Atwater has looked further into the records relating to the colourful character of Stobo, investigating both his credibility and the accuracy and reliability of his statistics, while seeking additional information on when the walls were built and by whom. In forming a picture of limestone wall-building on the island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Professor Atwater is seeking to establish what this can reveal about the potential distribution of the boulders by a tsunami hundreds of years earlier; at the heart of his investigation is ‘the problem that we had of distinguishing between boulders moved by water and boulders moved by people’.
Professor Atwater’s research into this region, combining scientific analysis with his study of human activity as revealed in the written historical record, continues. Though a self confessed ‘sediment guy’ Professor Atwater is evidently fascinated by the human story glimpsed in these Colonial Office papers, speaking of his respect for ‘the wall builders going in there and clearing pasture and clearing rocks, and what a huge human effort it was’. For the important story of tsunami activity of 600 years ago, and what this might suggest for the future, the intricate record-keeping of the obscure figure of John Stobo has, perhaps surprisingly, come to play important part.
Colonial office documents are clarifying geological evidence for a Caribbean tsunami. Access to [them] has made a huge difference for what we’ve been doing.
About the collection
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