By Bernama
Melbourne : Australia has installed a deep ocean tsunami buoy in the Coral Sea off its northeastern coast, which will boost tsunami detection in a region which has seen two tsunamis that killed more than 2,000 people since 1998.
“The new buoy was deployed in the Coral Sea last week and is now operational,” Environment Minister Peter Garrett is quoted by the Australian Associated Press (AAP) as saying.
“It is monitoring changes in sea levels for signs of potential threat from the South Solomon and New Hebrides trenches to the east coast of Australia,” Garrett says.
In April 2007, the Solomon Islands were hit by a tsunami that killed at least 34 people and destroyed up to 2,500 homes.
In July 1998, two undersea quakes of magnitude 7.0 created three tsunamis that killed at least 2,100 people near the town of Aitape on Papua New Guinea’s north coast.
Following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami which killed 230,000 people, Asian nations installed a series of satellite-linked tsunami detection buoys in the Indian Ocean.
Papua New Guinea and the neighbouring Solomon Islands lie on the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire”, where volcanic activity and earthquakes are common. Both are developing nations which rely heavily on Australian aid, the AAP report said.
Australia’s two Deep Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami (DART) buoys are part of the A$68.9 million Australian Tsunami Warning System progressively being installed around the island continent.
The Coral Sea buoy is the second installed. The first was positioned off Australia’s southern island state of Tasmania.