1810 Tsunami: Northern Norway
A tsunami caused by a landslide began at Northern Norway in 1810. It killed 14 people.
Where the waves reached
The source of the tsunami. No runup with a place is recorded for it.
- Under 1 m
- 1 to 3 m
- 3 to 10 m
- 10 to 30 m
- 30 m and more
- Height not recorded
Travel times
How long the first wave took to reach each part of the ocean, one line for each hour up to 24, estimated from the source and the depth of the sea.
The travel times are computed in your browser, which needs JavaScript.
- 1 to 4 hours
- 5 to 6 hours
- 7 to 14 hours
- 15 hours and more
Computed in your browser the way NOAA’s own travel time maps are: the wave travels at the square root of gravity times the depth, over NOAA’s ETOPO1 depths averaged to a 10 arc-minute grid. Checked against NOAA NCEI’s maps for 21 tsunamis over the first 24 hours, these lines fall within 10 minutes of NCEI’s at half the points compared and within 52 minutes at 9 in 10. They give when the first wave could arrive, not how high it is; bays, harbors and island chains finer than the grid can see it later. Not for use in a warning: see tsunami.gov.
The tsunami
- Date
- 1810
- Source
- Northern Norway
- Cause
- Landslide
- Runups recorded
- 0
- Tsunami intensity (Soloviev-Imamura)
- 6
- Waters
- Ocean
- How certain
- Definite tsunami
- Source location
- 69.433° N, 20.150° E
The toll
- Deaths
- 14
- Damage
- Moderate (about $1 to $5 million)
- Houses destroyed
- Few (about 1 to 50)
Where the literature gives no number, NCEI records a description on a scale of 1 to 4, printed here in its words. Damage is in millions of US dollars of the year of the event, not adjusted for inflation.
What the record says
NCEI’s account, from the sources it cites.
3 waves in Lyngsfjord (reference #4139)
1810, Northern Norway, 69.433 N 20.15 E (reference #11164)
1807-1817. Helland (1899, p. 78) describes a rockslide at the shore of Lyngsfjorden which occurred in the 1830's and where the sea level rose considerably and washed away several farms, drowning 19 people. This is probably the same slide as described in the Skilling Magazine of 1867 (p.255-256), which records that approximately 50 to 68 years earlier a tremendous rockslide occurred in Lyngsdalen. This slide caused large waves which washed toward the shore and took with it houses and people and drowned about 14 people. It is specially mentioned that "3 times broke the sea", which would indicate 3 waves. The description in the Skilling Magazine is reproduced in extenso by Svendsen and Werswick (1961, p. 159-161). (reference #13255)
More
Every tsunami in 1810The 1800sTsunamis of NorwayAlerts in force
Sources
Tsunami events and runups from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, Global Historical Hazard Database, cited as NCEI/WDS, doi:10.7289/V5PN93H7. Public domain. Read 2026-09-24. NCEI tsunami event 4254.