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Canberra (pte020/17.06.2005/11:48) - Australian scientists have been closely monitoring the aftershocks of the 26 December tsunami in the Indian Ocean region. Without a doubt, they say, there will be another one. It is just not certain when.
"It could happen any time, it could take another 20 to 50 years, or another 200 years," said Phil Cummins, senior earthquake analyst at the Australian government's seismic monitoring organization Geoscience Australia http://www.ga.gov.au.
The region around Indonesia is part of the world's most active earthquake zones, running along the Java-Sunda trench to the west and south of Indonesia and curving across the top of New Guinea island. It accounts for about one third of the world's earthquakes.
The Indo-Australian plate is moving north, under the Eurasian plate at a rate of six centimetres a year. Although this may not seem like much, pressure builds up over centuries and could result in an earthquake that would move the earth by 12 meters or more.
Last year's Indonesian earthquake was the result of a 1200km-long fault line that slipped about 20 meters, causing the biggest earthquake in 40 years. This lifted the ocean floor facilitated a tsunami - a sea wave produced by submarine earth movement - that hit 13 countries and left about 230,000 dead or missing.
On 28 March an earthquake that measured 8.7 on the Richter Scale struck Nias off Sumatra, killing about 900. Less than a month ago another earthquake with a magnitude of 6.9 hit the southeast of Nias.
Professor Ray Cas from Melbourne's Monash University http://www.monash.edu.au maintains that the increased number of smaller earthquakes in the region makes it less likely that another major quake was on the way.
"The more small-scale earthquakes that occur in that region, the better. But that doesn't mean that somewhere else along that fault zone, you won't get a similar build up of pressure," Cas said. "It's in zones where there are known active faults, and where there has been little significant earthquake activity for some time, that there is a need to be concerned."
Two other scientists, Professor John McCloskey of the University of Ulster http://www.ulst.ac.uk/ in Northern Ireland and Professor Peter Mora, from the University of Queensland's Earth Systems Computational Center http://www.esscc.uq.edu.au/ , both predict other earth quakes. But none of the scientists can say when exactly it will hit.
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