Earthquake triggers Tsunami off Java, Indonesia
Only 19 months after the disastrous Tsunami in December 2004, parts of Indonesia were now struck by another destructive event. At Monday, July 17th, 08:19 UTC, an earthquake occurred south of Java with a magnitude of 7.7 Mw (Source: USGS).
At 08:36 UTC, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PWTC), located at Hawaii, issued a warning for parts of Indonesia. The arrival time at the city of Cilacap at the Indonesian coast was predicted to be at 09:00 UTC (16:00 local time).
Eventually, a flood wave up to four meters high hit the coastline in the south of Java over a length of 180km.
 Figure 1: Preliminary location of the epicenter off Java, July, 17th 2006, 08:19 UTC. Source: H. Latief, A. Riadi and D. Zulkarnaen: Preliminary Result of the 2006 West Java Tsunami Simulation.
Despite the Tsunami warning in hand, the arriving flood caused a large number of victims (more than 550 victims were confirmed two days after the event. Source: Reuters). As an important conclusion of the disaster, it becomes clear, that the sole arrival of a warning at the authorities is not sufficient to take life-saving measures.
The German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS), which is currently under development, focuses its aims on faster warning mechanisms, communication structures for publishing the warning as well as on preparation of the population to adequately react to warning events.
Apart from the Geoforschungszentrum Potsdam (GFZ) managing this project, the Helmholtz-Centers AWI, DLR und GKSS Forschungszentrum as well as several German and Indonesian partners are part of the consortium. Among other things, scientists in these institutes work on the analysis of different scenarios for wave propagation to make this information usable in the case of a new event. By the end of the year 2008, the system is supposed to start operating.
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Further information about the project GITEWS can be found on the official webseite at http://www.gitews.org.
Detailed information concerning actual earthquake events are available on the Internet site of the GEOFON-Network.
Interview extracts with scientists involved in GITEWS can be found on Internet sites of Spiegel, Berliner Zeitung and geoscience-online.
For further questions, please contact the GFZ Potsdam press office: presse@gfz-potsdam.de
Phone +49 (0)331 288 1040.
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