Indonesian authorities have lifted a tsunami warning that was issued after a strong earthquake struck off the northern region of Sulawesi island. Indonesia earthquake had a magnitude of 7.7, said the country's meteorological agency. VOA news reports about the Indonesia earthquake.

The deadly Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which claimed more than 200,000 lives, was not the first of its size to hit the region, according to new research by an international research team led by Dr. Karin Monecke, a former post-doctoral geologist at Kent State University.

A quarter-million people were killed when a tsunami inundated Indian Ocean coastlines the day after Christmas in 2004. Now scientists have found evidence that the event was not a first-time occurrence.

A line of massive boulders on the western shore of Tonga may be evidence of the most powerful volcano-triggered tsunami found to date. Up to 9 meters (30 feet) high and weighing up to 1.6 million kilograms (3.5 million pounds), the seven coral boulders are located 100 to 400 meters (300 to 1,300 feet) from the coast.

Rather than building stronger ocean-based structures to withstand tsunamis, it might be easier to simply make the structures disappear.

After completing their simulation component in the German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS), the team for tsunami modelling of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association has presented the currently leading software system for tsunami events with the potential for catastrophe.

Indonesia issued a tsunami warning on Monday after a powerful quake struck off the western coast of Sumatra island.

A new review of tsunami hazards concludes that the 2004 catastrophe was far from the worst possible in many Indian Ocean borderlands - and notes that warning systems to guard at-risk populations are still lagging.

Rice University Earth scientist Dale Sawyer and colleagues last month reported the discovery of a strong variation in the tectonic stresses in a region of the Pacific Ocean notorious for generating devastating earthquakes and tsunamis in southeastern Japan.

The German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System for the Indian Ocean (GITEWS) runs on track. Main milestones like the development of the automatic data processing software SeisComP3, as well as the underwater communication for the transmission of the pressure data from the ocean floor to a warning centre are already finalised.

Bremerhaven, November 15, 2007. In order to extend alert times and avoid false alarms, a new seafloor pressure recording system has been designed to detect tsunamis shortly after their development in the open ocean. The project is directed by scientists of the working group ‘Marine Observation Systems’ at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, part of the Helmholtz Association.

Research announced this week by a team of U.S. and Japanese geoscientists may help explain why part of the seafloor near the southwest coast of Japan is particularly good at generating devastating tsunamis, such as the 1944 Tonankai event, which killed at least 1,200 people. The findings will help scientists assess the risk of giant tsunamis in other regions of the world.