ORIGINAL PAPER Inundation studies for Nagapattinam region on the east coast of India due to tsunamigenic earthquakes from the Andaman region Kirti Srivastava • R. Krishna Kumar • M. Swapna • V. Swaroopa Rani • V. P. Dimri Received: 14 July 2011 / Accepted: 15 August 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Abstract The Andaman-Sumatra arc is an active subduction zone and had generated several destructive tsunamis in the past. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami has led to more and more paleotsunamic research of identifying geological evidences of past submergence. These paleotsunamic studies along the east coast of India are suggestive of a predecessor for the 2004 tsunami about 1,000 years back. One of the historical earthquakes in this region was the earthquake of June 26, 1941 in the North Andaman region which was one of the strongest in Bay of Bengal. This earthquake had triggered a tsunami which affected the east coast of India. After few hours of the occurrence of this earthquake, a series of strong aftershocks occurred in the same source region. Two events with magnitude 6.0 struck within 24 h after the main shock of June 27, 1941, and there were 14 aftershocks of magnitude up to 6.0 till January 1942. In this paper, we have modeled two scenarios of tsunamigenic earthquakes, i.e., the 1941 North Andaman earthquake and another possibly great tsunamigenic earthquake. The run-ups at Nagapattinam due to the 1941 earthquake is around 0.95–1.25 m and inundation extent ranges from 77 to 110 m, and for a possibly large tsunamigenic earthquake, we find the run-ups are around 2.39–3.60 m and inundation extent ranges from 462 to 638 m. Keywords Tsunami  Subduction zone  Wave propagation  Indian Ocean  Run-ups  Inundation  Nagapattinam 1 Introduction The December 26, 2004, Sumatra and the recent March 11, 2011, Tohoku tsunami have alerted the mankind and drawn the attention of the earth science community. The December 26, 2004, earthquake of Mw 9.3 occurred along the plate boundary marked by subduction zone between the Indian plate and the Burmese micro plate near Sumatra Island of Indonesia. This earthquake has a rupture length of 1,400 km propagating toward the K. Srivastava (&)  R. Krishna Kumar  M. Swapna  V. Swaroopa Rani  V. P. Dimri National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad 500007, India e-mail: kirti@ngri.res.in 123 Nat Hazards DOI 10.1007/s11069-011-9946-x