The tsunami that devastated countries all around the Indian Ocean also hit Bermuda, but only the tide gauges noticed.

A tide gauge at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research recorded the increase in wave size, by just 20 centimetres on December 27.

Physical oceanographer at BBSR, Dr. Rod Johnson, said Bermuda often gets these deviations, or increases in levels from the predicted, due to eddies and atmospheric effects.

It is possible for scientists to monitor tides years in advance and these are the predicted levels, but the increase on December 27 was possibly a direct result of the tsunami which had travelled across the Atlantic.

"Low pressure systems can cause a rise, as every millibar difference from normal atmospheric pressure is equivalent of one centimetre rise in sea level, and this happens from time to time," he said.

Dr. Johnson added that a typical strong gale can drop atmospheric pressure by up to 20 millibars which can cause the sea level to increase up to 20 centimetres.

"But what made this particular incident so interesting was that it was a significant rise with no such interference," he said.

He said he also noticed some large swells along South Shore from late December to January 1, but was not sure if this was a direct result of the tsunami still bouncing around.

"It was a very long period wave and not a local wind wave and appears much longer than wind waves as it causes a larger volume of water to sweep up on the shore," he said.

Tide gauges have always played an important part in global ocean systems in monitoring global ocean sea levels.

Dr. Johnson said what made Bermuda so unique was the Island's location. Right in the middle of the ocean as well as the fact that the Island has very little shelf, making the Island the perfect place to put tide gauges or equipment like the inverted eco-sounder.

"It's basically an instrument mounted on the sea bed in deep ocean and very similar to depth sounders used by boats, but instead of looking down, it looks up and monitors sea level height," he said.

But he added that in the deep ocean like the Atlantic, tsunamis do not make much difference in sea level height, they need shallow water to make their devastating impact felt.

In the US, tide gauges along the East Coast also measured the passage of a "train" of waves, 32 hours after the earthquake struck off Sumatra's west coast on December 26.

The tide gauge at Atlantic City measured waves just under nine inches from crest to trough and at Port Canaveral in Florida, waves of 13.4 inches were recorded 24 minutes later.

The tsunami was so powerful that according to scientists at the Canadian Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia, it swept around the world over the next 36 hours and its last residual waves perceptibly jostled tide gauges from Russia's remote north-eastern Pacific waters to the North Atlantic.

The evidence of the tsunami's passage in the Atlantic is particularly significant, seismologists and oceanographers said, because data on how quake-generated waves move here are scant compared with information available for the Pacific.

The newly discovered records of the Atlantic waves, even from Bermuda, are significant as they could help improve computer simulations of tsunami behaviour in the Atlantic.

Such simulations can help scientists predict where tsunamis generated in the Atlantic might strike.

Scientists say the silent signal of the tsunami's journey once it left the Indian Ocean was detected almost immediately in the Pacific Ocean, where 90 percent of tsunamis occur and tide gauges are specifically designed to catch trains of waves generated by underwater earthquakes.