The scientists have predicted that another serious earthquake on the scale of the one that triggered the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, could hit the Indian Ocean within the lifetime of a child born now.

Tsunami that hit the planet in 2004 was caused by a major quake off the west coast of Sumatra, which produced waves up to 100ft high and killed more than 225,000 people in 11 countries and scientists have recently predicted that it could repeat itself in the same region within the next few decades.

This conclusion have been issued through research in which they studied corals, which like tree trunks have annual growth rings that record environmental changes. I When the sea floor is pushed up by the earthquake, it lowers the local level of the sea and it forces the corals to grow outwards.

This signature was looked by the scientists in the cross sections of ancient corals along a 434-mile stretch of a major fault line off the coast of Sumatra's Mentawai islands. It was found that multiple sets of large earthquakes had occurred along the line, repeated roughly every 200 years for at least for the past 700 years.

A potion of the same fault was ruptured by the December 2004 earthquake further to the west.

The scientists said in taking in regard the previous pattern, “A big earthquake recorded on the fault line in September 2007 could be the start of a new set of major seismic disruptions.”

They also added, “Earlier episodes had varied in length from a few decades to a little over a century. It was therefore impossible to forecast precisely when the next event would happen.”

“This past variability precludes a precise empirical forecast of the next great earthquake and tsunami. Nonetheless, to those living in harm's way on the coasts of western Sumatra, it should be useful to know that the next great earthquake and tsunami are likely to occur within the next few decades, and well within the lifetimes of children and young adults living there now,” they concluded in the journal Science.