China’s tsunami warning center to serve South China Sea border countries

China’s international tsunami warning center has opened, serving countries along the South China Sea border, oceanic officials announced Thursday.

The center, built and managed by China, monitors major earthquake subduction zones – where the Earth’s plates converge – in the South China, Sulu and Sulawesi seas and provides uninterrupted warning services, said Wang Hua, a State Oceanic Administration (SOA) official.

The South China Sea region is prone to tsunamis and littoral countries have, until now, relied on services provided by American and Japanese warning centers.

Wang said the center was the result of practical maritime cooperation between countries around the South China Sea.

Yuan Ye, director of the National Tsunami Warning Center, said China is now capable of warning the public of a tsunami eight to ten minutes after an earthquake.

In 1897, a tsunami caused by an earthquake in the northern Sulu Sea killed more than 100 people. An earthquake of 8.0-magnitude in the Sulawesi Sea in 1976 resulted in nearly 8,000 deaths in the Philippines.

More than 80 percent of tsunamis occur in the Pacific.

Numerical simulation shows that if an 8.5-magnitude earthquake hit the Manila Trench in the north, the tsunami it triggers would have a severe effect on the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and south China’s coastal areas, said Yu Fujiang, director of the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center.