NESTLED in sleepy South Oxfordshire, Wallingford is probably the last place on earth you would expect a tsunami.

Yet in a hidden-away laboratory in the peaceful town this week scientists unveiled one of the most advanced wave simulators in the world.

The tank at HR Wallingford is 70m long, 4m wide and contains 70,000 litres of water.

By creating tiny versions of the devastating natural disasters, it will provide the most accurate test yet of tsunami forces on buildings.

Technical director of maritime structures at HR Wallingford William Allsop said: "The unique feature of this simulator is that its tank-based generator allows us to create a realistic tsunami wave, so a 20-minute wave duration is scaled to just over two minutes in the lab.

"Almost no other device can do this."

The simulator will help evaluate whether existing flood defences are effective against tsunamis, or could amplify their destructiveness by allowing flood waters to build up in front of defences then – when they fail – suddenly inundate areas behind.

The machine will be used over the next three years by researchers at HR Wallingford and a team from University College London.

Together they hope to improve engineering and disaster management for tsunami-prone countries around the world.

Tiziana Rossetto, professor of earthquake engineering at UCL, who is leading the research, said: "Tsunamis can be exceptionally destructive when they hit buildings, yet we really don’t know a great deal about how the massive horizontal forces they generate act on buildings to cause damage.

"The challenge has been to build a testing facility where we can accurately model these forces on a variety of physical structures, as well as how the forces change or are magnified by the way buildings are clustered together in coastal towns and cities."

The Indian Ocean tsunami that struck on Boxing Day 2004 killed 230,000 people in 14 countries.

Like almost all tsunamis it was caused when an earthquake in the middle of the ocean sent an enormous wave travelling at hundreds of miles an hour.

This new simulator, which is being part-funded by a €1.9m European Research Council grant, is the third generation simulator at HR Wallingford.

The independent engineering and environmental hydraulics organisation built its first tsunami simulator in 2008. It was used to successfully reproduce the 2004 boxing day tsunami at a scale of 1:50.

A second generation tsunami simulator was able to simulate the 2011 Japanese tsunami with its particularly complex wave profile.

This third generation simulator, the largest specialist tsunami device in Europe, improves the generation of both crest-led and trough-led tsunamis.

It will enable, for the first time, the simulation of a tsunami impact on urban areas, through modelling in detail the effects that tsunamis have on coast defences, and how water is channelled around clusters of buildings.