Tsunamis are typically associated with oceans, but they’ve also historically appeared in giant lakes near human farms. When scientists took a deeper dive into the specifics of these rare events, they reached a chilling conclusion—these “lake tsunamis” may strike densely populated lakeshores in the near future.

For a recently published study in Nature Communications, researchers studied how human land use near Lake Iseo in northwestern Italy increased the risk of massive tsunamis in the 12th and 13th centuries. The analysis examined known historical events, as there are records of powerful earthquakes and tsunamis striking the region in 1117 and again in 1222. While both natural and anthropogenic processes have since altered the landscape at Lake Iseo, the team warned there’s reason to believe these lake tsunamis may return—not just to Italy, but elsewhere in the world.

“Lake Iseo offers a unique natural archive,” Flavio Anselmetti, a study co-author and a geologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, said in a translated statement (via Google). “Here we can combine geological traces with historical accounts and thus understand how these catastrophic events unfolded.”

According to the study, Lake Iseo has been a longtime hotspot for human agriculture and pastoralism. Since the Roman period, the area has experienced a “threefold rise” in sediments fed into the lake as a result of human-driven erosion, the paper added. This caused abrupt changes in the lake’s border with the Oglio River delta—and this had consequences.

org. ” When the quakes hit, it shook these overloaded areas, sending massive amounts of sediment into the lake’s deep basin and pushing the water above it into tsunami waves.

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