In the summer of 2025, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake occurred along the coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. While it wasn’t one of the five largest earthquakes ever recorded, its power was still impressive. That earthquake triggered a tsunami that swept across the Pacific, and NASA’s new SWOT satellite captured the massive wave in great detail.
The SWOT satellite, short for Surface Water and Ocean Topography, was just launched in 2022. The quake was the largest ever captured by the satellite. Using that and data from deep-sea tsunami buoys, researchers were able to map the earthquake’s rupture zone, which stretches about 250 miles and lifts parts of the seafloor up to 13 feet. The satellite is able to capture how tsunami waves change as they propagate, giving scientists an in-depth model from which to learn.
Research into the event was published in Seismic Records in November 2025. The publication highlights the dangers of large earthquakes and demonstrates how satellites such as SWOT are changing scientists’ ability to understand, track and predict tsunamis.
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SWOT satellite image of 2025 tsunami – BEST-BACKGROUNDS/Shutterstock
Satellites have changed the way we study the Earth, giving us rare glimpses of events in the ocean that humans might not be able to witness, like this record-breaking wave. To figure out how the 2025 Kamchatka tsunami formed and spread, scientists combined data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) tsunami warning system and NASA’s SWOT satellite.
The NOAA system, called DART (Deep Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis), uses sensors fixed to the seafloor to detect changes in water pressure. It then sends the data to ground buoys and satellites in near real-time. When the Kamchatka earthquake struck, several of the monitoring stations immediately went into high-alert mode to capture images of the tsunami moving away from the source.
The team focused on the closest sensors, filtering out normal ocean tides, so they could work backwards and estimate how the seafloor actually moved during earthquakes. Meanwhile, SWOT flew over the region and recorded a 75-mile-wide swath of the ocean surface, capturing the tsunami’s shape and movement in high resolution from space. Processing the data allowed scientists to clearly see the tsunami’s waves and how they spread and dissipated, despite how fast the tsunami moved.
What this means for tsunami science
Warning signs of entering the tsunami danger zone – Smith Collection/gado/Getty Images
Earthquakes and the tsunamis they cause may be more dangerous than we thought, and these data provide important insights that can help us understand and prepare for these events. Even more interestingly, its data can be compared to a magnitude 9.0 earthquake that occurred in the same area in 1952 and involved the same fault zone.
By comparing the two earthquakes, scientists concluded that the 1952 quake did not release all the accumulated stress in the fault, causing this latest quake. Because these earthquakes occurred so close together, it challenges long-standing hazard models that predict major earthquakes hundreds of years apart. The scientists were also able to analyze where the two earthquakes occurred, with the older one closer to the seafloor and the newer one deeper underground, and how this affected the size of tsunamis at the ocean’s surface. Although both tsunamis prompted evacuations, the 2025 tsunami did not cause as much damage as the 1952 tsunami.
The SWOT satellite has also demonstrated that it can rapidly provide data that could revolutionize real-world responses to tsunami emergencies. Underwater buoy systems working in conjunction with satellites have proven reliable in tracking tsunami waves. Scientists are now looking into the future of how the system could work with coastal warning systems to help the public safely respond to large tsunamis.
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Read the original article about BGR.