The Mediterranean is among areas at high risk, particularly the coasts of Greece and Turkey, both popular tourist destinations. The scientists are urging the installation of a tsunami warning system there as a matter of urgency.

They found that quakes such as the one in Indonesia can destabilise the whole of the earth’s crust — so that one is followed by others, often thousands of miles away, within a few years.

“The four biggest earthquakes of the 20th century all happened within 12 years of each other, a pattern we see repeated with other quakes over many decades,” said Vladimir Kossobokov of the International Institute of Earthquake Prediction in Moscow.

“It is highly likely that we will see several more on the scale of the Indonesian event in the next few years.”

The 20th-century series of four exceeding magnitude 9 on the Richter scale began with a quake in 1952 in Kamchatka, in the far east of Russia. It generated a tsunami that flooded coastlines all over the Pacific.

In 1957 another hit the Andreanof Islands in Alaska, generating a 50ft tsunami that hit ports from California to Japan.

The biggest and most destructive quake hit Chile three years later, killing more than 2,000 people and producing a 75ft tsunami that caused chaos across the Pacific. The last of the cluster hit Alaska in 1964, killing 130.

Kossobokov released his research at last week’s annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, alongside a separate study into the history of tsunamis around Europe.

That study, by Stefano Tinti, professor of geophysics at Bologna university, found that at least 232 tsunamis have hit Europe since prehistoric times. “Many of them were so powerful that they altered the course of civilisation,” he said.

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