Qualla: 2007 Solomon Islands Earthquake

2007 Solomon Islands Earthquake: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. At 7:39 in the morning on 2 April 2007, the seafloor off Gizo lurched. The Australia plate ground under the Pacific plate along a 250-kilometer stretch of the Solomon arc that had been quiet for a century, and the ground across Ghizo Island began to shake. The S-waves gave the warning. People who had felt earthquakes before knew what came next. Across the villages of the New Georgia Group, men and women grabbed children and ran - up the slopes, into the bush, away from the shore. Twenty minutes later the first wave arrived. Twelve meters high on Simbo, ten meters high at Choiseul, it washed away thirteen villages and killed fifty-two people. The survivors who ran uphill lived. Those who did not, mostly did not.

Image: Public domain

2007 Solomon Islands Earthquake: The Quake

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The focus was shallow - ten kilometers deep - and forty kilometers south-southeast of Gizo township. The U.S. Geological Survey registered the magnitude at 8.1; other scales put it at 7.8. The quake was what geologists call a megathrust: the Australia, Woodlark, and Solomon Sea p...

Image: Public domain

2007 Solomon Islands Earthquake: The Warning That Did Not Come

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Msdstefan at German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.0 de. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, headquartered in Hawaii, exists to send alerts across the ocean basin when a quake of this size fires off. Against a tsunami moving at twenty-five meters per second, the center had perhaps fifteen minutes to work with - and the wave closed the ...

Image: Msdstefan at German Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 2.0 de

2007 Solomon Islands Earthquake: Simbo and Choiseul

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nzeemin, CC BY-SA 3.0. The highest run-ups were recorded at the northern tip of Simbo, where the water reached twelve meters above normal sea level and erased two villages, Tapurai and Riquru, entirely. Ten people died on Simbo. In South Choiseul, ten-meter waves swept across the coastal plain, destroy...

Image: Nzeemin | CC BY-SA 3.0

2007 Solomon Islands Earthquake: Ranongga Rises

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. When the ground stopped moving, the island of Ranongga - in the New Georgia Group north of Gizo - was three meters higher than it had been that morning. Its beaches had extended outward by as much as seventy meters. Large sections of fringing reef, colonies of coral that had been...

Image: Public domain

2007 Solomon Islands Earthquake: Aftermath and Warning Buoys

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FinedonRes, CC BY-SA 3.0. Relief came from across the Pacific. Australia committed $5.7 million over the first months, New Zealand $7.5 million over two years, the United States $250,000, Taiwan $214,000 plus a thousand kilograms of rice, France airlifted supplies through New Caledonia. Papua New Guinea, ...

Image: FinedonRes | CC BY-SA 3.0