- LONDON (Reuters) - The earthquake
that triggered December's devastating Indian Ocean tsunami caused a 1,000
km (620 mile) rupture in the sea floor, scientists said on Wednesday.
-
- Using data from 60 Global Positioning System monitoring
sites in southeast Asia, scientists at ENS/CNRS research institute in Paris
calculated the unprecedented scale of the quake.
-
- "We show that the rupture plane for this earthquake
must have been at least 1,000 kilometers long," said Christophe Vigny
who headed the research team.
-
- The magnitude 9.15 earthquake, the biggest in 40 years,
erupted off the coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island. It triggered a tsunami
that left up to 232,000 people dead and missing in 13 Indian Ocean countries.
-
- Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand were most affected.
-
- Vigny and his colleagues used displacement data recorded
at the GPS sites across southeast Asia to construct and test models of
the length of the rupture and the direction of thrust.
-
- The satellite navigation network sites in Indonesia,
Malaysia and Thailand were between 400 to 3,000 km from the epicenter of
the December 26 quake.
-
- "Small but significant seismic jumps are clearly
detected more than 3,000 kilometers from the earthquake epicenter,"
Vigny said in a report in the science journal Nature.
-
- Scientists have warned that a second earthquake in South
Asia on March 28 increased stress on fault lines in the region, making
it more vulnerable to another rupture and a tsunami.
-
- Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited
without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable
for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance
thereon.
-
- http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050713/sc_nm/tsunami_dc
|