Aleutian tsunami likely swamped Hawaii centuries ago

Ars Technica : Tsunamis occur when an earthquake causes a section of an undersea fault to slip. The sudden displacement of crust launches a wave perpendicular to the fault. Knowing the positions of the faults that encircle the Pacific Ocean, Rhett Butler of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and his colleagues modeled the propagation of tsunamis from the northern Pacific. Their goal: to determine the origin of a huge tsunami that deposited debris in a sinkhole on the Hawaiian island of Kauai centuries ago. To fill the sinkhole, which lies 100 m from the shore, the tsunami must have topped 7 m. According to the simulations that Butler and his colleagues performed, the earthquake that caused the tsunami must have had a magnitude of at least 9. Crucially, the earthquake must have originated in the eastern Aleutian Islands. Tsunamis launched from other locations miss Hawaii.