High-speed wave Dr Goodbred first proposed the link between the layers of unusual debris found in sediment cores and a tsunami while studying shellfish populations in Great South Bay, Long Island.
He extracted many mud cores with incongruous 20cm layers of sand and gravel.
Their age matched that of wood deposits buried in the Hudson riverbed and marine fossils in a New Jersey debris flow in cores gathered by other researchers.
The fist-sized gravel he found in Long Island would require a high velocity of water - well over a metre per second - to land where it did, said Dr Goodbred.
Among the fossils and shells sandwiched in the organic black mud of Sandy Hook Bay, New Jersey, Marine Geologist Cecilia McHugh of Queens College, City University of New York, discovered mud balls made from red clay that matched iron-rich sediments found onshore.
The balls form their spherical shape only through vigorous reworking, said Dr McHugh, and they do not form in small storms.
"I didn't think much about it until we dated the deposit and came up with the same date that Steve did on Long Island," she said.
It prompted her to check cores extracted from the upper continental slope 200km offshore.
She discovered a 2,200-year-old layer of sand and mud, on top of sedimentary layers 8,000 to 14,000 years old.
Dr McHugh says such relatively young debris is not found that far out on the slope, and the date is close to that of the New York and New Jersey samples.
Age of a storm
The age and nature of the material make tsunami verification a challenge.
The radiocarbon dates of the debris are accurate to within a century, said Dr Goodbred. But the only evidence that a dramatic event took place thousands of years ago is common coastal debris - wood, sand, shells and rock.
Researchers must discern whether it was strewn by a tsunami or a hurricane, or another large storm, such as a "nor'easter", said Professor Driscoll.
Unusual layers in sediment cores may be a sign of an ancient tsunami
"Understanding the origins of these deposits can be difficult," he added.
While tsunamis can occur in any ocean, they are most common in the Pacific and Indian Oceans where continental plates collide.
There, large undersea earthquakes are relatively common.
In the Atlantic, where the plates spread, tsunamis are rare, which means Atlantic tsunamis are not well studied, said Bruce Jaffe, of the United States Geological Survey.
There is little research on tsunami debris in the variety of northeast coastal environments - riverbeds, marine bays - where the New York debris layers were found. There are few modern analogues to compare them with for identification, he said.
"Grand Banks is the only unequivocal tsunami in the Atlantic on the Northeast coast because there were eye-witness accounts and the deposits matched that of other modern tsunamis," said Dr Jaffe.
To rule out the possibility of a severe storm, said Professor Driscoll, tsunami groups should collect more core samples to see whether the distribution of the debris is consistent.
Dr Goodbred said teams were planning to do just that. And this would confirm that the deposits are not quirks of local geology.