Tsunami hit area could be hit again - UU

The stresses in the earth’s crust which have resulted from the South East Asia earthquake and subsequent tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 have significantly increased the risk of another large earthquake in the already-devastated Indonesian island of Sumatra, new research findings by scientists from the University of Ulster’s School of Environmental Sciences have revealed.

According to their calculations, published in this week’s edition of leading scientific journal Nature, the Christmas 2004 earthquake which generated the massive tsunami which hit Indonesia, Thailand, India and Sri Lanka and killed 300,000 people, has significantly increased the stress on two other fault zones in the area - one of them running directly under the city of Banda Aceh which was so badly effected by the Boxing day event - the other under the sea off the west coast of Sumatra.

This undersea fault line could generate another tsunami if there is another significant geological shift.

“Our results show a stress increase of up to 5 bars in the Sunda trench next to the rupture zone, and a strong positive loading of 9 bars for 300km of the Sumatra fault,” said team leader Professor John McCloskey.

“We have all heard that lightning does not strike twice in the same place, but earthquakes do. One of the strongest observations in seismology is that earthquakes cluster in space and time. Where you have one earthquake you are likely to have others.”

In the wake of their findings, the UU team said they were adding their voices to the calls for a tsunami early-warning system to be put in place in the Indian Ocean as a matter of urgency.

“The loss of much of the life in the December earthquake was avoidable,” Professor McCloskey said. “The science is well understood, the warning systems are in place in the Pacific region. The levels of preparedness, public awareness and education in this region are high and do save lives.

"Unfortunately the people of the Indian Ocean region have neither benefited from this knowledge nor from the available technology,” he added.

(MB/SP)