SEISMIC ACTIVITY OFF SOUTH-EAST ASIAN COAST WILL PERSIST FOR A YEAR - SCIENTIST

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MOSCOW, December 27. (RIA Novosti) - The underwater quake (whose magnitude was 10-11) in the Indian Ocean became the strongest throughout the whole history of observations conducted in this area for more than 300 years. Low seismic activity off the Southeast Asian coast will persist for a year. Yevgeny Rogozhin, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Earth Physics, said this to RIA Novosti.

"There will be no repeated quakes. However, there will be events of a little lower seismic activity - for a year or a year and a half," the scientist said. He specified that the wave has already passed and repeated quakes will be a thousand times weaker, while the waves created by them will be commensurate to those created by the ocean.

The scientist also told RIA Novosti that at present practically every developing country that has an outlet to the ocean has a tsunami warning system. However, in the affected areas there was no such a system and such observations were not conducted. This is the first calamity of such a scale and apparently this is why "it was not believed to be necessary," Rogozhin surmised.

The epicenter of the underground quake in the Indian Ocean is situated 600-700 km from the Thai coast and over 1,000 km from the Indonesian coast, while the speed at which tsunamis travel is 500-1,000 km per hour, Rogozhin explained. "If they had had such a service, there would have been a lot of time to warn the population about the wave," he explained.

Now "demands" to create such a service "may be made" on the states affected by the tsunami.

Anyway, in Rogozhin's opinion, tourists "have nothing to do there" for the next few months and it is hard to predict whether such strong seismic phenomena will be repeated in a year.

As of now, the Asian quake toll has reached 23,900.

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