Waves of destruction in the East Indies: the Wichmann catalogue of earthquakes and tsunami in the Indonesian region from 1538 to 1877 RON HARRIS 1 * & JONATHAN MAJOR 1,2 1 Department of Geological Sciences, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602–4606, USA 2 Present address: Bureau of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78758, USA *Corresponding author (e-mail: rharris@byu.edu) Abstract: The two volumes of Arthur Wichmann’s Die Erdbeben Des Indischen Archipels [The Earthquakes of the Indian Archipelago] (1918 and 1922) document 61 regional earthquakes and 36 tsunamis between 1538 and 1877 in the Indonesian region. The largest and best documented are the events of 1770 and 1859 in the Molucca Sea region, of 1629, 1774 and 1852 in the Banda Sea region, the 1820 event in Makassar, the 1857 event in Dili, Timor, the 1815 event in Bali and Lom- bok, the events of 1699, 1771, 1780, 1815, 1848 and 1852 in Java, and the events of 1797, 1818, 1833 and 1861 in Sumatra. Most of these events caused damage over a broad region, and are asso- ciated with years of temporal and spatial clustering of earthquakes. The earthquakes left many cit- ies in ‘rubble heaps’. Some events spawned tsunamis with run-up heights .15 m that swept many coastal villages away. 2004 marked the recurrence of some of these events in western Indonesia. However, there has not been a major shallow earthquake (M ≥ 8) in Java and eastern Indonesia for the past 160 years. During this time of relative quiescence, enough tectonic strain energy has accumulated across sev- eral active faults to cause major earthquake and tsunami events, such as those documented in the historical records presented here. The disaster potential of these events is much greater now than in the past due to exponential growth in population and urbanization in areas destroyed by past events. Supplementary material: Translation of the catalogues into English, scanned PDFs of the original catalogues and geographical locations of most place names found in the catalogue (as a KMZ file) are available at https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.2860405.v1 Recent earthquake catastrophes in Japan (2011), Haiti (2010) and Chengdu, China (2008) all occurred in regions mapped as relatively ‘low’ seismic hazard (Stein et al. 2012). One factor contributing to this forecasting failure is the over-reliance on the relatively short (50 year) instrumental earthquake record. Although historical records of centuries of seismic events exist in these regions, they were rarely used in hazard assessments. Reliable data from historical accounts of earthquake and tsunami events can help constrain long-term seismic poten- tial in areas with little to no earthquakes during the past 50 years (Musson & Jimenez 2008). An example of earthquake and tsunami fore- casting success using historical records is the recon- struction by Newcomb & McCann (1987) of mega-thrust events along the Sumatran subduction zone. They primarily used Die Erdbeben Des Indis- chen Archipels [The Earthquakes of the Indian Archipelago] by Arthur Wichmann (1918, 1922) to demonstrate that a series of megathrust earthquakes occurred during the nineteenth century along vari- ous segments of the subduction zone. Some of these events have now reoccurred, such as the 2005 north- ern Sumatra earthquake near Nias Island, which was nearly of the same magnitude and ruptured close to the same area as that estimated by Newcomb & McCann (1987) from descriptions in the Wichmann catalogue of an 1861 earthquake and tsunami (see Supplementary material). Arthur Wichmann was a German geologist and professor in geology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Much of Wichmann’s professional career was spent studying the geology of Indonesia, including several expeditions to eastern Indonesia. He wrote the catalogue in old German, but included passages in Dutch, English, French and Latin. It is evident that Wichmann tried to preserve and use the original accounts as much as possible. However, he was careful to note conflicting reports, errors in dates From:Cummins, P. R. & Meilano, I. (eds) Geohazards in Indonesia: Earth Science for Disaster Risk Reduction. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 441, http://doi.org/10.1144/SP441.2 # 2016 The Author(s). Published by The Geological Society of London. All rights reserved. For permissions: http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/permissions. Publishing disclaimer: www.geolsoc.org.uk/pub_ethics by guest on May 24, 2016 http://sp.lyellcollection.org/ Downloaded from