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[1] Coral reefs track sea level and are particularly sensitive to changes in climate. Reefs are threatened by global warming, with many experiencing increased coral bleaching. Warmer sea surface temperatures might enable reef expansion into mid latitudes. Here we report multibeam sonar and coring that reveal an extensive relict coral reef around Lord Howe Island, which is fringed by the southernmost reef in the Pacific Ocean. The relict reef, in water depths of 25-50 m, flourished in early Holocene and covered an area more than 20 times larger than the modern reef. Radiocarbon and uranium-series dating indicates that corals grew between 9000 and 7000 years ago. The reef was subsequently drowned, and backstepped to its modern limited extent. This relict reef, with localised re-establishment of corals in the past three millennia, could become a substrate for reef expansion in response to warmer temperatures, anticipated later this century and beyond, if corals are able to recolonise its surface.

Abstract-The occurrence of the Indian Ocean Tsunami on 26 December, 2004 has raised concern about the difficulty in determining appropriate tsunami mitigation measures in Australia, due to the lack of information on the tsunami threat. A first step in the development of such measures is a tsunami hazard assessment, which gives an indication of which areas of coastline are most likely to experience tsunamis, and how likely such events are. Here we present the results of a probabilistic tsunami hazard assessment for Western Australia (WA). Compared to other parts of Australia, the WA coastline experiences a relatively high frequency of tsunami occurrence. This hazard is due to earthquakes along the Sunda Arc, south of Indonesia. Our work shows that large earthquakes offshore of Java and Sumba are likely to be a greater threat to WA than those offshore of Sumatra or elsewhere in Indonesia. A magnitude 9 earthquake offshore of the Indonesian islands of Java or Sumba has the potential to significantly impact a large part of the West Australian coastline. The level of hazard varies along the coast, but is highest along the coast from Carnarvon to Dampier. Tsunamis generated by other sources (e.g., large intraplate events, volcanoes, landslides and asteroids) were not considered in this study.

This paper presents a framework and data for spatially distributed assessment of tsunami inundation models. Our associated validation test is based upon the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which affords a uniquely large amount of observational data for events of this kind. Specifically, we use eyewitness accounts to assess onshore flow depths and speeds as well as a detailed inundation survey of Patong City, Thailand to compare modelled and observed inundation. Model predictions matched well the detailed inundation survey as well as altimetry data from the JASON satellite, eyewitness accounts of wave front arrival times and onshore flow speeds. Important buildings and other structures were incorporated into the underlying elevation model and are shown to have a large influence on inundation extent.

The effect of offshore coral reefs on the impact from a tsunami remains controversial. For example, field surveys after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami indicate that the energy of the tsunami was reduced by natural coral reef barriers in Sri Lanka, but there was no indication that coral reefs off Banda Aceh, Indonesia had any effect on the tsunami. In this paper, we investigate whether the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) offshore Queensland, Australia, may have weakened the tsunami impact from the 2007 Solomon Islands earthquake. The fault slip distribution of the 2007 Solomon Islands earthquake was firstly obtained by teleseismic inversion. The tsunami was then propagated to shallow water just offshore the coast by solving the linear shallow water equations using a staggered grid finite-difference method. We used a relatively high resolution (approximately 250 m) bathymetric grid for the region just off the coast containing the reef. The tsunami waveforms recorded at tide gauge stations along the Australian coast were then compared to the results from the tsunami simulation when using both the realistic 250 m resolution bathymetry and with two grids having fictitious bathymetry: One in which the the GBR has been replaced by a smooth interpolation from depths outside the GBR to the coast (the ''No GBR'' grid), and one in which the GBR has been replaced by a flat plane at a depth equal to the mean water depth of the GBR (the ''Average GBR'' grid). From the comparison between the synthetic waveforms both with and without the Great Barrier Reef, we found that the Great Barrier Reef significantly weakened the tsunami impact. According to our model, the coral reefs delayed the tsunami arrival time by 5-10 minutes, decreased the amplitude of the first tsunami pulse to half or less, and lengthened the period of the tsunami.