Hong Kong, Macao at 10 pc risk of being hit by tsunami in 100 years

Hong Kong and Macao, both sprawling economic centres perched on the South China Sea stand a 10 percent chance of being hit by a serious tsunami in the next century, geophysicists have said.

London, Aug 28 : Hong Kong and Macao, both sprawling economic centres perched on the South China Sea stand a 10 percent chance of being hit by a serious tsunami in the next century, geophysicists have said.

The warning follows a new assessment of how earthquakes along the nearby Manila trench could radiate tsunami waves across the South China Sea.

Although Chinese records of tsunamis date back to AD 171, the hazard was largely ignored until the cataclysmic December 26, 2004 tsunami off the coast of Sumatra.

However, the structure of the complex plate boundary on the eastern side of the South China Sea, running from Taiwan to the Manila trench, makes shallow subduction-related quakes particularly likely.

This problem was highlighted by the quake in December 2006 that disrupted Internet traffic in the region when it ripped through subsea data cables.

Geologists now believe such earthquakes could also trigger tsunamis.

To assess the threat, Yingchun Liu of the Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing developed a computer model with David Yuen's group at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

They identified the sites where major quakes were most likely, then modelled how the tsunamis they produced would spread and their heights as they reached major cities.

Finally, they factored in the tsunami risks of all possible large quakes for each location.

Findings revealed that all coastal regions, stretching north from Macao and Hong Kong to beyond Shantou - a city of 1.2 million people where the tropic of Cancer crosses the Chinese coast - had about a 1-in-10 chance of being struck by a tsumani within 100 years.

The study appears in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, reports New Scientist.

ANI