The island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Darker blue indicates deeper waters (up to 5,000 m); light blue/white indicated shallow waters and sea level. Not far from the western coast of Sumatra, the Australian Plate is sliding under the Sunda plate. Marked in red is the city of Padang, which may yet see worse Earthquakes.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
PARIS: A huge earthquake, capable of generating a tsunami as deadly as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is set to strike off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, according to seismologists.
Led by John McCloskey, a professor of the Environmental Sciences Research Institute at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, who predicted a 2005 Sumatran quake with uncanny accuracy, the seismologists issued the warning in a letter to the journal Nature Geoscience.
The peril comes from a relentless buildup of pressure over the last two centuries on a section of the Sunda Trench, one of the world's most notorious earthquake zones, which runs parallel to the western Sumatra coast, they said.
Blunt warnings
This section, named after the Mentawai islands, "is near failure," the letter warned bluntly.
"The threat of a great tsunamigenic earthquake with a magnitude of more than 8.5 on the Mentawai patch is unabated [...] There is potential for loss of life on the scale of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami."
The letter gave no time frame for this event but warned starkly of the danger for Padang, a city of 850,000 people that lies broadside to the risky segment.
"The threat from such an event is clear and the need for urgent mitigating action remains extremely high," it said.
More than 220,000 people lost their lives in the killer wave of 26 December 2004 when a 9.3-magnitude earthquake, occurring farther north on the Sunda Trench, ruptured the boundary where the Australian plate of Earth's crust plunges beneath the Eurasian plate.
Boxing day tsunami predicted by McCloskey
In March 2005, McCloskey warned that the 26 December 2004 quake had built up major stress in an adjoining part of the fault to the south. He declared a temblor in the region of 8.5 magnitude with the capacity to generate a tsunami was imminent and urged the authorities to beef up preparations.
Such predictions are extraordinarily rare in the world of seismology. Knowledge of where earthquakes strike is extensive but the ability to say when they will occur remains elusive.
But McCloskey was proven right within two weeks. On 28 March 2005, a quake measuring 8.6 erupted at Simeulue island, generating a three-metre-high tsunami.
