An international team of geoscientists has uncovered geological differences between two segments of an earthquake fault that may explain why the 2004 Sumatra Boxing Day Tsunami was so much more devastating than a second earthquake-generated tsunami three months later. This could help solve what has been a lingering mystery for earthquake researchers.
The quakes were caused by ruptures on adjacent segments of the same fault. One key difference was that the southern part of the fault that ruptured in 2004, producing the larger quake and tsunami, appears bright on subsurface seismic images possibly explained by a lower density fault zone than the surrounding sediments.
