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.…