How common are tsunamis in the Indian Ocean?
Tsunamis are rare in the Indian Ocean though there have been seven records of tsunamis set off by earthquakes near Indonesia, Pakistan and at the Bay of Bengal. This is the first multi-ocean tsunami since Krakatoa erupted in 1883. In the 1990s the United Nations International Co-ordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific discussed the danger of tsunamis in both the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. In September 1997 it met in Peru to discuss extending the warning network to the Indian Ocean. Nothing concrete resulted. A seismologist with the Australian geosciences agency, Dr Phil Cummins, told a meeting of the international tsunami group in October 2003 that the international warning network had to be expanded into the Indian Ocean. Following that Dr Cummins worked on records kept by Dutch colonists in Sumatra discovering that earthquakes in the area had created great ocean-spanning waves in the Indian Ocean. One such followed the great Sumatran earthquake of 1833. In
