Northern Bay of Bengal faces tsunami risk, says study

But Phil Cummins of Geoscience Australia says another danger lurks to the north along the coast of Myanmar and Bangladesh, in a so-called subduction zone — where one part of the Earth’s crust is slowly diving under another.

A vicious “locked-thrust” fault, of the kind that unleashes tsunamis, runs parallel to the shore in similar fashion to the Sumatra fault, he believes. It has been overlooked because the last big quake occurred nearly two and a half centuries ago, and the fault lies hidden under seabed sediment up to 20 km , he contends.