See How NASA’s GUARDIAN Tsunami Detection System Works

  • Released Friday, March 20, 2026
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On July 29, 2025, when a magnitude 8.8 earthquake near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula generated a tsunami, NASA used a new experimental system to detect it 32 minutes earlier than existing systems.

Here’s how it works: When a tsunami moves through the ocean, it displaces a massive amount of water across hundreds of square miles — nearly all at once. That displacement doesn’t just move sideways. It pushes energy upward, sending invisible sound and gravity waves all the way into the upper atmosphere.

Up there, those waves disturb the ionosphere — the layer of the atmosphere that satellite navigation signals pass through on their way down to Earth. GUARDIAN watches for those tiny disturbances across a network of more than 350 existing ground stations worldwide and uses them as an early warning signal.

GUARDIAN isn’t designed to replace the warning systems we already have — it’s designed to make them faster and more complete. The data is intended to be open and accessible to emergency managers around the world, because when a wave is coming, every minute matters.

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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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This page was originally published on Friday, March 20, 2026.
This page was last updated on Monday, March 23, 2026 at 3:19 PM EDT.