German scientists spotted Indonesian quake within 5 minutes

BERLIN: German researchers said they measured the size and location of Wednesday's earthquake off Indonesia within a record five minutes in a development that could mean the difference between life and death for people in the path of a tsunami.

"We managed to get the informatinin under five minutes yesterday," Professor Joachim Zschu from Germany' national research centre for geoscience (GFZ) in Potsdam outside Berlin, told on Thursday.
   
"In the past this was not possible, we could get it at best in under a quarter of an hour to half an hour," he said.

The German reaction time on Wednesday was more than 10 minutes faster than the alert raised by the Paciic Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii, which measures eartquakes around the ocean's massive faultline.

"The difference in time is really important because the challenge is to warn people away from the coastline within minutes. It takes 10 to 20 minutes before tsunami hits the coastline," he said.
   
"If you have the information this soon after the earthquake hits, you could get information to hotels and villages and avert a potential disaster."

The 8.4-magnitude quake that struck off the west coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island was measured with software that the Germans had been developing even before the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster which killed 168,000 people in the island's Aceh province alone.

The GFZ's Alexander Ruloff said information was relayed via satellite from 11 measuring stations in the ocean to computers in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, where staff alerted the authorities.