The intensity of the massive tsunami and the catastrophic death toll might have been reduced in India and Sri Lanka had India and Sri Lanka been part of an international warning system designed to warn coastal communities about potentially deadly waves.The system alerts the nations about the potentially destructive waves hitting their coastlines well in three to 14 hours in advance.

According to scientists, seismic networks recorded yesterday?s massive earthquake, but without wave sensors in the region, there was no way to determine the direction a tsunami would travel. The researchers said a single wave station south of the earthquake?s epicentre registered tsunami activity less than 60 cm high heading south towards Australia.

This international warning system was started in 1965, the year after tsunamis associated with a magnitude 9.2 temblor struck Alaska in 1964. It is administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Among the member nations are all the major Pacific rim nations in North America, Asia and South America, was well as the Pacific islands, Australia and New Zealand, France and Russia. However, India and Sri Lanka are not members of the warning centre.

The Director of Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, Charles McCreary said, ?That?s because tsunamis are much less frequent in the Indian Ocean.? The northern tip of the earthquake fault is located near the Andaman Islands, and tsunamis appear to have rushed eastward towards the Thai resort of Phuket yesterday morning when the community was just stirring.

According to the researchers, the earthquake broke on a fault line deep off the Sumatra coast, running north and south for about 966 km or as far north as the Andaman and Nicobar islands between India and Mynamar. ?It?s a huge rupture,? McCreary said. ?It?s conceivable that the sea floor deformed all the way along that rupture, and that?s what initiates tsunamis?. Large and destructive tsunamis, like the one yesterday, typically happen only a few times in a century. ?It was a big tsunami, but it is hard to say exactly how many waves there were or what happened,? McCreary said.

The warning system analyses earthquake information from several seismic networks, including the US Geological Service. The seismic information is fed into computer models that ?picture? how and where a tsunami might form. It dispatches warnings about imminent tsunami hazards, including predictions how fast the waves are travelling and their expected arrival times in specific geographic areas. As the waves rush past tidal stations in the ocean, bulletins updating the tsunami warning are issued. Other models generate ?inundation maps? of what areas could be damaged, and what communities might be spared.