Date: 1/10/2006
Scientists demonstrated that the global positioning system (GPS), using newly developed data processing software, can determine within minutes whether an earthquake is powerful enough to generate an ocean-wide tsunami. The new GPS displacement method is based on precisely measuring when radio signals from GPS satellites arrive at ground stations located within a few thousand kilometres of a quake. Scientists can calculate how far the stations moved because of the quake, and then derive the quakeâs true size, its moment magnitude. This magnitude is directly related to a quakeâs tsunami-generation potential.
