Certified Extreme Event Modeler (CEEM) Practice Test

A tsunamigenic event is any event that can displace enough seawater to generate a tsunami. This displacement often comes from vertical movement of the seafloor or a sudden mass movement of water, such as submarine earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, large landslides into the ocean, or even a meteor impact. Because of that, the defining idea is the ability to create a tsunami, not just any tsunami wave itself or an event that cannot cause one. So the correct choice describes an event that can produce a tsunami. The other options don’t fit: something that cannot cause a tsunami isn’t tsunamigenic; an earthquake happening anywhere isn’t guaranteed to generate a tsunami, and not all earthquakes do; and a tsunami about to hit land is the wave itself, not the initiating event that could create it.