The new research findings demonstrate that both seawalls higher than five meters and coastal forests reduce damage and death from tsunamis. Nateghi used a modeling method called Random Forest, which harnesses numerous "decision trees" to capture complex non-linear relationships of data. Seawalls more than five meters high were shown to reduce the destruction rate, and, more specifically, a 10-meter increase in height was associated with about a 5 to 6 percent decrease in the destruction rate. 

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The paper is available at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0158375 . 

via Purdue University News Service and PhysOrg: bit.ly/tsunami-seawall

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-seawalls-coastal-forests-japan-tsunami.html#jCp

Watch more at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU2GkLpn66k