Abstract: Tsunami is one of the worst marine disasters. Coastal lowland areas can be seriously flooded as the result of high tsunami waves, which cause a significant threat to human life and property. High tsunami waves can move an extensive amount of coastal sediments and cause a significant change of beach profiles in flooded regions. This paper summarizes the status quo and advances in the study of tsunami waves from the perspective of beach profile evolution, sand grains sorting, scour around coastal structures and numerical simulation. In general, it has been a lack of experimental study and numerical simulation of tsunami impacts in a controllable manner. Specifically, it has been a lack of concern on sorting of sand grains by tsunami waves and insufficient understanding of the mechanism of scour around structures, as well as a lack of multi-scale numerical simulation. The experimental study in the giant wave flume, the development of multi-scale hybrid mathematical models and the improvement on the sediment transport computation theory should be the focus points in tsunami studies. This review study provides a useful reference for the future research.