Wednesday, December 29 2004 17:20 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Bangalore: A team of scientists from Madras University have claimed that they had predicted the Sunday earthquake in Sumatra which triggered the killer Tsunami, based on the planetary movements, but fell short in assessing its magnitude and the exact location by about 150 kms.

Madras University Applied Geology Department Professor N Rajeshwar Rao and research scholar N Venkatanathan for the past one and half years were trying to predict earthquakes based on alignment of planets with a "good amount" of success and a margin error of three days.

"We had identified a set of 15 locations on Christmas eve, Christmas and boxing day (Dec 26) and had mentioned Sumatra as well. There were earthquakes in 12 of them," Rao said over the phone from Chennai.

"We had assessed the magnitude to be about six to seven on the Richter scale but never imagined that it would be 8.9," he said adding their novel predictive model had achieved a "moderate success rate of 77 per cent".

The researchers' earthquake model is based on the alignment of planets with the earth and in case of the Sumatra disaster, alignment of - Mercury, Venus, Sun and Moon - with the earth, Rao says but adds, the prediction could be more accurate if they are able to access the fault zone data.

The Chennai team had on December 22 sent their predictions to the US Geological survey, International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics and NASA, but had not received any response, Rao said, adding, that their model was yet to be validated independently.