The Royal Navy's HMS Scott has been taking underwater sonar readings off the Indonesian island of Sumatra to try to find out how the December 26 earthquake unfolded and then produced the giant waves that have killed nearly 300,000 people in 11 countries.

The ship's officers presented the readings in the form of colored digital mapping at the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office in Taunton, Somerset, southwest England, indicating a large landslide some 100 metres highfeet) by two kilometres (1.2 miles) in length.

HMS Scott's Commanding Officer Steve Malcolm said initial assessments by scientists indicate two of the earth's tectonic plates clashed together, causing a ridge on the seabed which forced sea water to travel upwards to form the devastating tsunami.

It must have occurred "like the rumpling up of a carpet," he said.

He said he hoped the survey would give a warning as to when this could happen again "with the aim of removing the likelihood of such a terrible loss of life".

HMS Scott's survey will provide the "base map" for future extensive research into the process of how earthquakes work and how they produce tsunamis.

Data will help produce charts to build a picture of what happened on December 26 and what might happen next.

The commander said it was hoped the Indonesian government would permit the release of as much information as possible to the wider local community "to give warning to prevent such a tragedy happening again".

He said the survey and its images, though unable to give exact predictions of when earthquakes will occur, could indicate a level of risk.

The depth of the water in the area of the epicenter varies between 200 and 5,000 metres (670 and 16,700 feet), all of which is within the HMS Scott's capability, scientists say.

The epicenter of the quake, which measured a massive 9.0 on the Richter scale, lies within the Indonesian Exclusive Economic Zone.

The survey will fall under the definition of Marine Scientific Research under the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea.

HMS Scott sailed from Plymouth's Devonport Naval Base in November last year to undertake a program of military-based data gathering in the North Atlantic, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.

Scientists from Southampton Oceanography Centre and the British Geological Survey have been working with the crew on the Scott since January 26.

The images show bands of color representing different seabed depths due to ridges and canyons in the seabed structure. Those in blue are some 4,300 metres deep (canyons) while those in red are shallower at around 1,000 metres deep (ridges).

The naval staff said they believed that after the collision of the plates, high ridges in the structure of the seabed crumbled to form a "canyon".

The images show the "canyon" created from the landslide movement in blue. Commander Malcolm described this movement as like "scree sliding down the side of a quarry".

Royal Navy Captain Ian Turner told the conference: "I believe from a scientific perspective the images from the seabed of Sumatra are no less exciting or significant than the images we saw recently beamed back from space from the surface of the planet Triton."

The earthquake's epicentre is shown on the images with a small yellow dot and the centre of movement of the plates is shown with a red dot.