The Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake of 2004 left a lot of damage to the world. Also known as the Indian Ocean Earthquake of 2004, the event was a great undersea earthquake of Magnitude 9 (M9), that triggered a series of devastating tsunamis and killed a great number of people around South and Southeast Asia.

No one ever predicted this earthquake. As a matter of fact, the area where the earthquake occurred was thought to be one of the least likely area that an M9 earthquake could happen. This is why in the March 23 issue of the journal Science, a geophysicist from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute urges the public and policy makers to consider previously thought M9 earthquake-free areas to be as dangerous as those labelled M9 earthquake-prone.

Robert McCaffrey, the said geophysicist, has been tracking the movement of the earth under Sumatra through Global Positioning System since 1989. He noticed as early as then that the area was already loaded for a potential great earthquake.

Geophysicists have previously predicted the possibility of M9 earthquakes happening by studying records that go as far back as 100 years. M9 earthquakes occur at boundaries called "subduction zones", where one teutonic plate is gently slipping another plate, causing friction and lifting of the plates. Slips lengthy enough to cause an M9 occur only every 200 to 1,000 years.

McCaffrey says that:

Now is the time to use the knowledge that we have gained and work to save lives should another M9 hit tomorrow or hundreds of years from now. Many didn’t know about tsunamis before the quake; we must make sure that now they never fail to remember their destructive force.