BANGKOK, Feb 23: Bangkok has shifted nine centimetres because of the Dec 26 earthquake that measured 9.0 on the Richter scale and sent devastating tsunamis across the Indian Ocean, local newspapers reported Wednesday.

The tourist island of Phuket also moved 32 centimetres since the quake, said the Chulalongkorn University researchers, who used Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites to measure shifts during a Jan 20-24 survey.

"We found that around one month after the earthquake, Bangkok had moved horizontally south west wards by about nine centi-meters, and Phuket moved horizontally by about 32 centimetres south west wards as well," researcher Itthi Trisirisattayawong told the Bangkok Post.

"We don't want people to panic. We insist that it is common for land to move by one centimeter a year," Itthi said. The movements were not expected to affect people's daily lives, he said, but technicians would have to draft new technical maps with the changes geographical positions. But he told the paper that researchers in Malaysia had found that country has been moving westwards by one centimeter every week since the quake, and that a similar phenomenon was probably happening in southern Thailand. -AFP