Untangling boulder dislodgement in storms and tsunamis: Is it possible with simple theories?

Boulders can move during storms and tsunamis. It is difficult to find a simple method to distinguish boulders moved by tsunami waves from those moved during storms in the field. In this contribution, we explore boulder dislodgement by storm and tsunami waves by solving an adapted version of Newton's Second Law of Motion in polar coordinates and defining a critical position for boulder dislodgement. We find that the boulder dislodgement is not only a function of the causative wave, but also of the roughness in the vicinity of the boulder and the slope angle. We employ the amplitude of storm and tsunami waves to dislodge boulders of given masses to evaluate if boulder dislodgement in storms can be untangled from boulder transport in tsunamis. As the main result of our numerical experiments, we find a significant difference between storm and tsunami waves to dislodge the same boulder for large masses and large roughness values. This allows us to conclude that simple theories are applicable to answer the questions asked in the title, but we argue only if they contain a critical dislodgement condition like the one presented here.