Eden was the launching point for a 3000 kilometre sea voyage to update part of Australia’s important Tsunami Warning System (TWS) last week.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
One third of all earthquakes worldwide occur along an 8000 kilometre stretch which circles Australia from Indonesia to New Zealand.
Fault lines therein could generate a tsunami which could reach our coastline within two to four hours, such as the Boxing Day 2004 earthquake in Indonesia which claimed the lives of more than 280,000 people and is counted among one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern times.
The good news is the TWS could buy the public at least 90 minutes warning.
On Saturday at midday, the 30metre offshore support vessel PMG Pride left Eden after plotting a course for the southern tip of New Zealand.
There it will change over two buoys, deploy a pressure sensor and retrieve an experimental buoy, one of the originals of the five-year-old system.
Led by Bureau of Meteorology engineer and technician Alan Thomas, the team will deploy millions of dollars worth of equipment, some of it to the ocean floor at a depth of five kilometres, in an effort to prevent more loss of life from tsunami.
The moorings are expected to take about an hour and a half to reach the ocean floor travelling between 10 and 20 knots (18 to 37 kilometres an hour).
Mr Thomas said the software contained within can detect tsunamis as small as 30 millimetres but the equipment is sensitive to a change of one millimetre, excluding fluctuations from tides and wind.
It is the primary source of early warning for tsunamis headed for the Australian coast, also providing data for the Pacific Tsunami Warning System and Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System.
“We’re aiming for at least a 90 minute warning for the public of Australia for a tsunami,” Mr Thomas said.
“There’s three major fault lines in the Indian, Tasman and the Coral Sea and we have tsunami tide stations around the country as well.
“When there is an event, a trigger will go off and contact head office and they work with GeoScience Australia (which monitors earthquakes) then they issue a warning.”
