China's earthquake monitoring department managed to detect and report an earthquake within 10 minutes with a new digital network, the China Earthquake Administration (CEA) announced on Friday.

The network, under construction since June 2004, passed an examination by a 19-member expert panel here on Friday.

Until now, it's taken 30 minutes to report an earthquake, said Chen Xinlian, the CEA's chief engineer for the new network.

The new network can detect a quake as small as 2.5 on the Richter scale, compared with 4.5 now, he said. In six areas of China that have volcanic activity, it can detect an earthquake of just 1.0 on the Richter scale, he added.

As part of the 2.28 billion yuan (330 million US dollars) project, China built state-of-the-art detecting stations in all 31 provincial divisions in the mainland and linked them by computer.

"The new milestone network will take China's earthquake monitoring capacity to a new stage," said Chen Jianmin, the CEA director.

According to an earlier CEA report, China has about 1,200 earthquake monitoring stations and 25 provincial divisions have set up emergency teams for earthquake rescue and relief.

China, sitting between the Indian Ocean and Pacific plates, is one of the areas with the most tectonic activity in the world.

(Xinhua News Agency April 12, 2008)