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British Navy releases photo of underwater landslide that caused tsunami
UK scientists have released images of the ocean floor near the epicentre of December's giant Asian earthquake.
They were obtained by the Royal Navy's hydrographic survey ship HMS Scott.
The three-dimensional pictures detail the deformed seabed 150km (94 miles) off the Sumatran coast, and reveal huge underwater landslides.
Researchers involved in the project believe the images may help in the design of the tsunami early warning system to be built in the region.
"There are features which we would think are something like the Grand Canyon would look," Tim Henstock, one of the scientists on board HMS Scott, told BBC News.
"You can see huge piles of mud maybe a few hundred metres thick; there's lots of evidence of activity at the subduction zone."
Water disturbance
The images show clearly the boundary between the Indian and Burma tectonic plates - a region known as the Sunda Arc.
The flat Indian plate shows up in purple, which turns to blue as this portion of the Earth's oceanic crust disappears underneath the Burma micro-plate (part of the Eurasian plate).
The forces created by this process have rumpled and buckled the surface rocks, whose folds show up in green and yellow.
Some images appear to show a large landslide some 100m high and two kilometres in length.
Scientists involved in this project believe the tsunami occurred when a portion of the Burma plate, which had been dragged down by the edge of the descending Indian plate, rebounded upwards, transmitting huge energy to the water above.
It is the first time that this area of seabed has been mapped in detail, though project scientists believe that oil companies have conducted surveys here in the past.
Images returned so far reveal that while some portions of this subduction area were obviously involved in the Boxing Day earthquake, others were not.
Courtesy and Copyright: British Broadcasting Corporation TECHNOLOGY ARTICLES
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