An earthquake occurred south of the Aleutian Islands which stretch across the top of the Pacific Ocean like Alaska's tail, on March 9, 1957. The undersea quake set off tsunamis towards the Alaskan coast and Hawaii. Official records from 50 years ago said, "Thanks to a timely alarm from the International Pacific Tsunami Warning Center at Honolulu, no human lives were lost."

Tsunami alert systems are not as recent a phenomenon as we may think. They were more likely to be called "tidal waves" in those times, the detection systems relied strongly on seismographic hardware installed to detect underground nuclear weapons tests as much as earthquakes, and the alerting systems relied just as strongly on military communication networks, telephone lines and broadcast radio frequencies.

A huge wave that lurches out of a placid sea to devastate coastal communities without warning is a powerful image of human dread. They happen so infrequently that humans do not choose to live away from the coast to avoid them, but frequently enough for humans to try to install systems which will warn them if one is coming their way.

The 2004 Boxing Day earthquake off Sumatra which triggered destructive tsunamis around the eastern Indian Ocean has led to a new effort by Pacific and Asian countries to install integrated warning systems which will be more sensitive and comprehensive than ever before. By 2010, when the work is scheduled to be completed, the designers expect to be able to give at least 90 minutes warning of tsunami impacts in Australia due to seismic events far away from our shores.

But as last week's quake and tsunami near the Solomon Islands showed, getting the geology and seismography right is just one part of a successful tsunami warning system. You also have to get the information and communications technologies right, not to mention the public information systems and the social psychology.

Pictures published online by The Cairns Post on the day of the quake, when preliminary warnings were given that a tsunami may have been heading for the north Queensland coast, show two diametrically opposed responses. Some show roads clogged with cars heading for the hills, others show people in shorts leaning on the town's seawall.

Both responses are valid, given that incomplete information was available. What will change as the warning system is completed?

Australia already has a good network of sensors to detect and locate seismic activity within its territory but the 2004 event made it clear that this was inadequate to detect threats from further afield. International systems are able to do that, but communication between them and our national system and our ability to quickly model likely tsunami heights and directions were found to be lacking.

Geoscience Australia is installing seismic systems in the surrounding region to vastly increase the area in which it can detect, locate and measure earthquakes. But knowing where a quake occurs and its scale is not sufficient information to predict possible subsequent tsunamis.

This requires real-time sea-level data, which will become progressively available as the Bureau of Meteorology installs a network of sea-level gauges and ocean buoys around the region. These will transmit data via satellite links to the bureau's operations centre in Melbourne where it will be processed by computer software designed to predict if, when and where a tsunami impact can be expected along the Australian coastline and how large that impact may be.

This information will then be passed to Emergency Management Australia's coordination centre in Canberra which will be responsible for issuing warnings to the public and local emergency services organisations.

But even if a minimum of 90 minutes warning is achieved, moving a coastal population out of harm's way in that time will be a challenging effort.

Much depends on the time of day, the density of the population, the topography of the threatened areas, and the nature of transport and communication systems. Telephone systems and roads will quickly become clogged, local evacuation coordination efforts may be understaffed as volunteers look to their own safety and that of their own families, and schools, hospitals and other institutions will be focal points of frantic activity. The good news for coastal Australians is that they are likely to have that amount of warning. Any major tsunamis which hit our coastline will most probably be generated by seismic events in the arc of instability that runs through Indonesia and Papua New Guinea to our north and down through the Solomons and other Pacific Islands to New Zealand. Our distance from these events will generally be sufficient to allow our warning systems to operate within planned tolerances.

Less likely is an event close to our own coastline. Although the Australian continent is comparatively stable, earthquakes still occur and can trigger underwater landslides along the slopes of the continental shelf.

These can cause powerful localised tsunamis, such as that which devastated a village on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea in 1998, which can hit the coast within minutes. Last week in the Solomons, some coastal sites were hit by the tsunami as soon as 10 minutes after the quake, and Honiara within 50 minutes.

In that case, all technology is redundant the only warning you get is the rumble of the ground beneath your feet.

Simon Grose is a Canberra science and technology writer