London, Sep 26 (IANS) Why build stronger ocean-based structures to withstand Tsunamis, when it might be much easier to make them disappear.

Physicists at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille Universite in France and the University of Liverpool in England have conducted lab experiments showing that it’s possible to make a type of dike that acts as a cloak hiding off-shore platforms from water waves.

The principle is analogous to the optical invisibility cloaks that are currently a hot area of physics research, according to a release of the American Physical Society.

Tsunami invisibility cloaks wouldn’t make structures disappear from sight, but they could manipulate ocean waves in ways that makes off-shore platforms, and possibly even coastlines and small islands, effectively invisible to tsunamis.

If the scheme works as well in the real world as the lab-scale experiments suggest, a tsunami should be able to pass right by with little or no effect on anything hidden behind the cloak.

This study will be published in a forthcoming issue of Physical Review Letters of the American Physical Society.