UC San Diego seismologist Alice Gabriel was one researcher on a multi-institution team which won supercomputing's most lauded prize last week for its studies on a real-time tsunami monitoring prototype.
Gabriel, who works in UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and her colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory won the 2025 Association for Computing Machinery Gordon Bell Prize on Thursday.
The award-winning research used some of the world's largest supercomputers in a "digital twin" model to simulate the seismically active Cascadia subduction zone of the Pacific Northwest in such a complex manner, it reduces the time needed to calculate the variables from roughly 50 years to less than a second.
A digital twin is a computer replica of the real geophysical system that combines physics models with real world observations to estimate the changing variables and explore plausible futures.
"Using the largest supercomputers in the world, we developed new algorithms using seafloor sensors to forecast tsunami wave heights and their uncertainties in fractions of a second, 10 billion times faster than conventional algorithms," Gabriel said. "Our work shows that physics-based models of earthquakes and tsunami generation are now fast enough to guide real- time response, which not only improves early warning for the Pacific Northwest, but also points the way toward global, physics-based earthquake and tsunami early-warning systems."
Such a system, which could be put in place with as few as 600 pressure sensors along the length of the subduction zone — an area that spans 700 miles from Northern California to British Columbia, Canada — would dramatically reduce tsunami warning times by monitoring changes on the ocean floor from any seismic event.
Gabriel told City News Service it can take 10-15 minutes for scientists to recognize a probable tsunami event and disseminate that information to the public, like what happened in July when an 8.8 magnitude earthquake rocked the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia and tsunami warnings were issued as far away as San Diego County.
For the Pacific Northwest fault, just 100 miles off the coast — reducing those 10-15 minutes could have life-saving consequences. The last major Cascadia earthquake was in 1700, and seismologists have estimated a 37% probability of a magnitude 8.0 or higher earthquake in the next 50 years.
"It is overdue," said Gabriel, who has been at Scripps Institution of Oceanography since 2022. "The science community has been pushing for a more robust monitoring system for almost a decade."
She said expense is the most prohibitive factor, but before her team's work, the methods to measure such movements were relatively untested.
Applications from the research could enable early warning systems in countries with lengthy coastlines and fewer monitoring stations than the United States has, as well as uses in other fields anticipating events ranging from wildfires, seismic ground motion and storm surges.
The Gordon Bell Prize is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of supercomputing and "rewards innovation in high performance computing applications in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics," according to the prize's website.
At the annual Supercomputing Conference, the team also earned the Hyperion Research HPC Innovation Excellence Award and the HPCWire Reader's Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences.
Gabriel was also nominated for the Bell Prize in 2014.
