Mumbai beach before the tsunami struck

SciDev.Net / David Dickson

Last week's earthquake, and the subsequent tsunami that struck coastlines in South and South-East Asia, have led to calls for a network of monitoring stations across the Indian Ocean to provide early warning of future events.

In this article, S. Z. Qazim, vice-chair of the Society for Indian Ocean Studies, says that building a tsunami prediction network for the Indian Ocean would be a massive and expensive task. Instead, he says, India should link its tsunami detection efforts to the network that already operates in the Pacific Ocean, where tsunamis are more common.

Qazim calls on India to invite tsunami experts to analyse what happened and advise the country on the likelihood of it happening again before large quantities of money are committed any tsunami detection systems.

Link to full article in The Indian Express