Coastal sedimentation associated with the June 2nd and 3rd, 1994 tsunami in Rajegwesi, Java

This paper presents the second detailed study of sediments deposited by modern tsunamis, the first being that of the Flores (Indonesia) tsunami of December 1992 (Shi et al., 1995). Sediment cores were collected from areas in which eyewitnesses reported sediment deposition. Grain size analysis shows pronounced vertical variations in grain size as well as changes in standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis that appear to be indicative of complex tsunami flooding. Vertical variations in grain size in individual cores are greater than spatial variations between cores taken ailing a transect completed perpendicular to the coastline. The Java tsunami-deposited sediments do not show unequivocal evidence of local erosion but instead evidence for sediment transport and deposition is clear and is characterised by dominantly unimodal sediments with fine-tailed distributions.