Quake moved Sumatra by only 20cm: Experts

Quake moved Sumatra by only 20cm: Experts

The Indonesian islands of Sumatra moved only 20 centimeters on
average after last month's Asian earthquake and tsunami, and not
dozens of meters as previously feared, media reported on Monday,
quoting calculations by the Danish Space Center.

The new numbers, reported on television channel TV2's website,
vary greatly from reports in the days following the devastating
Dec. 26 earthquake that the tip of the Sumatra island may have
moved by as much as 36 meters.

U.S. Geological Survey scientist Ken Hudnut told AFP on Dec.
27 that some of the smaller Sumatra islands may have moved about
20 meters while the northeastern tip of the Indonesian territory
could have slid about 36 meters to the southwest after the quake,
which measured 9.0 on the Richter scale.

Scientists Shfaqat Abbas Khan and Olafur Gudmundsson of the
Danish Space Center, who used a GPS satellite system to determine
the extent of the plate movement following the earthquake, have
however since found that the island did not move more than 20
centimeters on average.

"For the Sumatra earthquake there were horizontal moves of
about seven meters around the crack area. But that area is about
200 to 300 kilometers west of Sumatra, so Sumatra itself could
only have moved about 20 centimeters," Khan told TV2.

The two Danish scientists' findings also contradicts a report
from the Malaysian navy published on Monday stating that the
depth in certain stretches of the narrow Malacca Strait, one of
the world's busiest shipping lanes, had changed by as much as two
meters after the quake.

"The GPS observations show that the Malacca Strait near
Sumatra basically hasn't changed," Khan said. --AFP