UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 29 -- An international agency that monitors nuclear explosions around the world almost certainly picked up immediate signs of the underwater earthquake and tsunami in South East Asia on instruments it operates around the Indian Ocean, but it had no chance to alert governments in the region because its offices were closed for the holidays, according to a spokeswoman.
The information from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization's network may yield insights into the catastrophe but would not have been critical in saving lives, because there is no functioning system capable of channeling early warnings to regions struck by the tsunami, said earthquake and tsunami experts. Still, the agency's failure to react during one of the most catastrophic seismic events in decades has proved embarrassing, officials said.
This satellite image taken shortly after the tsunami hit the southwest coast of Sri Lanka shows powerful, swirling waves and flooding.
(Digitalglobe Via Reuters)
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Daniela Rozgonova, spokeswoman for the Vienna-based agency, said raw data from its seismic and hydroacoustic monitoring stations in the region will be reviewed by analysts when they return from vacation on Tuesday.
She insisted that a team of about 100 analysts at the agency's International Data Center in Vienna would not have been able to get a warning to tsunami victims even if they had been at work. "The whole system has not been set up to warn for natural disasters," she said. "It's not set up for it."
The test ban organization is constructing an international network of more than 320 monitoring stations to detect whether countries are conducting underwater or atmospheric nuclear tests. While the system is not fully operating, there are 175 functioning stations, including several in and around the Indian Ocean that can detect seismic and underwater signals. When its analysts detect an unusual seismic disturbance, they send off preliminary bulletins to dozens of member states within one to three hours. A more comprehensive report is issued within 24 hours.
Bernard Massinon, a French seismologist who serves as scientific adviser to the test ban organization, said the agency's seismic stations -- including eight in Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka -- could technically be linked to an early warning system for earthquakes and tsunamis if member states decided to do it.
"Could we help by providing real-time data from this network?" he said. "The answer should be yes."
Still, geoscientists said there was no shortage of instant data from other sources indicating that a massive 9.0 earthquake had struck off the coast of Indonesia and could generate a large tsunami. Seismic stations on the other side of the globe immediately detected a major quake, and Australia, which operates a tsunami warning center, issued an alert about half an hour after it occurred.
"They could tell exactly where it occurred instantly and they probably knew right away there was a big tsunami generated by this an hour or two before these waves hit Sri Lanka," said John Clague, an expert on earthquakes at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. The problem, he said, is that "there is no infrastructure to communicate it."
"There is already a global network that monitors earthquake activity and reports almost immediately on the occurrence of a major earthquake," said Harold Mofjeld, senior scientist at the tsunami research program of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He said the test ban organization's data "in principle could be integrated into an operational early warning system."
The Indian Ocean has little of the latest technology used to detect and track tsunamis in the Pacific Ocean, where they occur more frequently. Scientists use an array of devices to do this, including costly deep-water pressure sensors that detect the movement of waves passing by.
Massinon said the test ban agency's three Indian Ocean hydroacoustic stations on Diego Garcia island, Cape Leeuwin, Australia, and the French-owned Crozet Islands, have limited value in predicting the course of a tsunami.
Outside specialists said the acoustic measurements might be useful in assembling computer models of tsunami behavior but would not have made much difference in the disaster.
"The hydroacoustic stations probably recorded a lot of energy radiated by the main earthquake and its aftershocks, but those signals wouldn't give a clear indication of whether a tsunami was likely or not," said Jeffrey McGuire, assistant scientist for geology and geophysics at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
The United Nations' top humanitarian aid official, Jan Egeland, said the crisis has fueled interest in creating an early warning system for the Indian Ocean. Governments at an upcoming U.N.-sponsored meeting on natural disasters in Kobe, Japan, would discuss the issue, he said.
Salvano Briceno, the director of the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, called yesterday for speedy action to develop such a system. "I want to see that every coastal country around South Asia and Southeast Asia has at least a basic but effective tsunami warning system in place by this time next year," he said. "There is no reason this cannot be done."
"Clearly, there wasn't a proper warning system in place for that part of the world," President Bush said Wesnesday. "And it seems like to me it makes sense for the world to come together to develop a warning system that will help all nations."
