History reveals a hidden disaster at Shark Bay

But the risks of highly damaging tropical cyclones at Shark Bay are understudied, likely because it lies on the margins of cyclone impact and cyclones rarely occur there.

To better understand how such storms affect land use planning, emergency management and environmental management, a team of researchers modelled a powerful tropical cyclone that struck Shark Bay in 1921 using detailed data from historical records.

Led by Prof Adam Switzer from the Asian School of the Environment, who is also a principal investigator at NTU’s Earth Observatory of Singapore, the team developed a new framework that assessed factors like data accuracy and impartiality to quantify the quality of the records.

By reconstructing the 1921 event, the researchers narrowed the combination of cyclone parameters that led to the impacts observed in the records, such as the sea level rise during the cyclone and the discovery of sharks and fish up to nine kilometres inland.

The results suggest that the 1921 cyclone caused the sea level at Shark Bay’s Denham town to rise by three metres, which was higher than previously thought. This implies that a repeat of the event would have devastating socio economic consequences, as a storm surge exceeding two metres at Denham now would likely flood critical infrastructure and cripple regional tourism.

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Read more about the study “The utility of historical records for hazard analysis in an area of marginal cyclone influence” in Communications Earth & Environment (2023), DOI: 10.1038/s43247-023-00844-z.

The article appeared first in NTU's research & innovation magazine Pushing Frontiers (issue #23, March 2024).