Bangkok moved 9cm after quake

From correspondents in Bangkok

February 23, 2005

BANGKOK shifted 9cm because of the December 26 earthquake that measured 9.0 on the Richter scale and sent devastating tsunamis across the Indian Ocean, local newspapers reported today.

The tourist island of Phuket also had moved 32cm since the quake, said the Chulalongkorn University researchers, who used Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites to measures the shifts during a January 20-24 survey.

"We found that around one month after the earthquake, Bangkok had moved horizontally south-westwards by about 9cm, and Phuket moved horizontally by about 32cm south-westwards as well," researcher Itthi Trisirisattayawong told the Bangkok Post.

"We don't want people to panic. We insist that it is common for land to move by 1cm a year," Itthi said.

The movements were not expected to affect people's daily lives, he said, but technicians would have to draft new technical maps with the changes geographical positions.

But he told the paper that researchers in Malaysia had found that country has been moving westwards by 1cm every week since the quake, and that a similar phenomenon was probably happening in southern Thailand.

Itthi's survey engineering department at Chulalongkorn is collecting data from six other locations in Thailand to get a better picture of how the nation's geography has changed, the Nation newspaper reported.

The quake was one of the most powerful on record, and unleashed deadly waves that killed 289,000 people.

The tsunamis killed 5395 people in southern Thailand, roughly half of them believed to be foreign tourists. About 3000 people are still listed as missing.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/commo...55E1702,00.html

I hope no one is relying on GPS positions for their land markers

We're obviously moving away from America and towards Europe. I wonder when we will see this reflected in air ticket prices.