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