The Indian Ocean Earthquake & Tsunami of 2004: Will History Repeat Itself?

Four years ago, December 26, 2004, the undersea earthquake in northern Sumatra. Mentawai section along the boundary between the Indo-Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates, which, by the strongest earthquake since the earthquake of magnitude 9.2, as Alaska, March 27, 1964, and the fact second largest earthquake in history, set in the huge ocean waves in motion.


The resulting tsunami killed some 230,000 people in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, the Andaman and Nicobar islands, the Maldives and other countries as far as the east coast of Africa. In fact, as Abhijit Ghosh and his colleagues withdrew earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, was the earthquake in the Indian Ocean, as it is called, tremors 9000 miles along the San Andreas Fault in California.

Among the dead were about 2,500 tourists from Europe and North America, including a report 543 of Sweden, and hundreds of Germans. Today, four years later, tourists from these countries to return, and daily life of most of its normal contour of the affected area. But scientists have found that the earthquake probably not as an isolated phenomenon, in fact, given the magnitude of events along the top of the lack of maintenance, historically, two or three to do. Several minor earthquakes have been affected area, but the next big elusive. It is to expect a scientific level of at least 8 to meet anytime and anywhere.

In anticipation of this event, reports Der Spiegel, a German research team has developed a system for tsunami monitoring, measuring buoys, seismometers, tide gauges and GPS stations, which "has the German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS). There is only one purpose: to save the inhabitants of the basin of the eastern Indian Ocean with the time to seek higher ground, thousands of lives. The system is already built several small earthquakes, to take effect.