Hearing the word ’tsunami’ often conjures up terrible images of the wave which hit Thailand to destroy whole towns and villages on Boxing Day in 2004.
And with the nearest sea being around 400km away, it seems unbelievable that Switzerland could be hit by a similar fate.
But the country is home to some of the biggest lakes in western Europe and experts claim this coupled with seismic activity in the region could make the country fall victim to the natural disaster.
Donat Fäh, from the Swiss earthquake service, said: “The Lake Lucerne is located in the area with the highest earthquake activity of all Swiss lakes in the area.”
The Swiss actually have a history of being hit by tsunamis. In 1601, eight people were killed after a 5.9 magnitude earthquake hit Unterwalden and caused a whopping four-metre wave to crash into the land from Lake Lucerne.
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Another four-metre-high tsunami occurred in September 1687, flooding swathes of the Vierwaldstättersee region.
And a huge landslide in Valais back in the year 563 saw people and livestock killed when it set off a tsunami on Lake Geneva.
Flavio Anselmetti, a geologist at the University of Bern, told 20 Minuten it was important to “quantify this underestimated natural danger”.
The 52-year-old is currently waiting for the green light for a new project, at a cost of £1.5 million (two million Swiss francs) largely funded by the Swiss National Fund, to find out exactly what the threat is.
Researchers will place a 200kg probe at the bottom of Lake Lucerne, leaving the device “for a few days at different points as well as for several months”.
A further eight ocean ground seismometers are to be added next year in the ongoing investigation conducted by ETH Zurich and its Swiss Federal Service, the University of Bern and the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences Bremen.
Data from the probes will be fed into a computer simulation to illustrate how likely a huge wave is and its potential strength.
It is hoped over two years the data will help scientists to uncover what is responsible for causing the lake floor to slip – a move that could potentially unleash deadly tsunami waves.