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.

The long-running civil war in Sri Lanka is causing more mental health problems and social breakdown than the catastrophic 2004 tsunami, according to research published in the online open access publication International Journal of Mental Health Systems.

U.S. seismologists say an earthquake with a magnitude of at least 7.5 has struck central Peru, prompting authorities to issue a tsunami warning.

The massive 9.2-magnitude Sumatra-Andaman earthquake on 26 December 2004 generated a tsunami that propagated throughout the Indian Ocean, killing more than 250,000 people.

The Sumatra-Andaman earthquake generated a catastrophic tsunami that caused heavy damage and fatalities in coastal areas around the Indian Ocean.

For the first time, a team of experts is preparing to create tsunami in a controlled environment in order to study their effects on buildings and coastlines - ultimately paving the way for the design of new structures better able to withstand their impact.

Though categorized as magnitude 7.8, the earthquake could scarcely be felt by beachgoers that afternoon. A low tide and wind-driven waves disguised the signs of receding water, so when the tsunami struck, it caught even lifeguards by surprise. That contributed to the death toll of more than 600 persons in Java, Indonesia.