Scientists discover Indonesian cave with 'stunning' record of tsunamis

news.com.au

30 points·kschua··7 comments

I can't find the original paper, unfortunately. With that said, it's interesting to compare the OP with the BBC's reporting of the same story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25269698

A story about something "stunning and beautiful" found in a cave, without any pictures of the cave.

These compact teaser stories have little substance. They're more about attracting clicks with "stunning" in the headline.

Wait, people thought tsunamis came on a schedule?

Yeah, the article doesn't clarify. But don't worry, all we need to know is they "don't operate like clockwork."

We have also learned that they "vary in size". And here I was thinking tsunamis came in one size only!

I guess the original article concluded that it doesn't look like a Poisson distribution, and this is the journalist's attempt to explain that for the intended audience.

[skims wikipedia] So does that mean there's not even a nicely defined average rate of tsunamis? Can you explain that in a slightly less dumbed-down way for someone who doesn't really know about statistics?

I haven't read the paper, so I don't even know whether they said anything remotely like that, but "not a Poisson process" could mean anything.

For example, if you start with a Poisson process of tsunamis, but add a tsunami exactly one year after each tsunami of that process, the resulting is not a Poisson process. Such a theory can easily be proven incorrect, but the idea that an event may make it more likely to have further events soon doesn't sound that illogical. After all, for earthquakes, we talk of aftershocks. In a true Poisson model of earthquakes the idea of aftershocks, that is, of relations between earthquakes would be nonsense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com