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Science 20 May 2005:
Vol. 308. no. 5725, pp. 1127 - 1133
DOI: 10.1126/science.1112250
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Research Articles

The Great Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake of 26 December 2004

Thorne Lay,1,2* Hiroo Kanamori,3 Charles J. Ammon,4 Meredith Nettles,5 Steven N. Ward,2 Richard C. Aster,6 Susan L. Beck,7 Susan L. Bilek,6 Michael R. Brudzinski,8,9 Rhett Butler,10 Heather R. DeShon,8 Göran Ekström,5 Kenji Satake,11 Stuart Sipkin12

The two largest earthquakes of the past 40 years ruptured a 1600-kilometer-long portion of the fault boundary between the Indo-Australian and southeastern Eurasian plates on 26 December 2004 [seismic moment magnitude (Mw) = 9.1 to 9.3] and 28 March 2005 (Mw = 8.6). The first event generated a tsunami that caused more than 283,000 deaths. Fault slip of up to 15 meters occurred near Banda Aceh, Sumatra, but to the north, along the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, rapid slip was much smaller. Tsunami and geodetic observations indicate that additional slow slip occurred in the north over a time scale of 50 minutes or longer.

1 Earth Sciences Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA.
2 Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA.
3 Seismological Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, MS 252-21, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
4 Department of Geosciences, The Pennsylvania State University, 440 Deike Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
5 Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, 20 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
6 Department of Earth and Environmental Science and Geophysical Research Center, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, NM 87801, USA.
7 Department of Geosciences, The University of Arizona, Gould-Simpson Building #77, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.
8 Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1215 West Dayton St., Madison, WI 53706, USA.
9 Geology Department, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, USA.
10 IRIS Consortium, 1200 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC, 20005, USA.
11 Geological Survey of Japan, Advanced Industrial Sciences and Technology, Site C7 1-1-1 Higashi, Tsukuba 305-8567, Japan.
12 National Earthquake Information Center, U.S. Geological Survey, Golden, CO 80401, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: thorne{at}pmc.ucsc.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)