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Tsunamis in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of tsunami news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about tsunamis, tsunami warnings or tsunami hazard, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, January 2022, the month of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption, was the month in which tsunamis took their largest share of the news, at 9.47 articles per 10,000 news articles, 5.49 times the 2019–2025 average of 1.73.
Basis: Monthly tsunami articles divided by all articles in the index for the same month, every month from January 2019 to July 2026; 1,576 tsunami articles in January 2022.
July 2025, the month of the Kamchatka earthquake, produced the largest number of tsunami news articles of any month between January 2019 and July 2026 (1,897) and the second-largest share of all news, at 8.08 articles per 10,000.
Basis: Monthly tsunami articles and all-news articles in the index.
March 2021, the month of the tenth anniversary of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, had the third-largest monthly share of tsunami news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 5.84 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Monthly tsunami articles per 10,000 news articles; 862 tsunami articles in March 2021.
December 2024, the month of the twentieth anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, had the fourth-largest monthly share of tsunami news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 4.47 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Monthly tsunami articles per 10,000 news articles; 868 tsunami articles in December 2024.
Between 2019 and 2025, tsunamis took between 1.3 (2020) and 2.04 (2025) of every 10,000 news articles in a global news index, with 2025 25.9% above 2024 and an average of 1.73 across the seven years.
Basis: Annual tsunami articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, complete years 2019–2025.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 2,026 | 26.96% | 0.56 |
| Japan | 2,011 | 26.76% | 25.18 |
| Indonesia | 638 | 8.49% | 30.53 |
| India | 335 | 4.46% | 0.34 |
| New Zealand | 225 | 2.99% | 4.63 |
| Russia | 219 | 2.91% | 3.87 |
| Philippines | 193 | 2.57% | 8.14 |
| Chile | 153 | 2.04% | 10.86 |
| China | 134 | 1.78% | 0.68 |
| United Kingdom | 130 | 1.73% | 0.3 |
| Taiwan | 110 | 1.46% | 11.02 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "tsunami" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Tsunamis in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/tsunami/