They say their analysis of the tremors - the biggest was a magnitude 8.7 - suggests major changes are taking place on the ocean floor that will eventually split the Indo-Australian plate in two.
It is not something that will happen soon; it could take millions of years.
"This is a process that probably started eight to 10 million years ago, so you can imagine how much longer it will take until we get a classic boundary," said Matthias Delescluse from the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.
Dr Delescluse is an author on one of three scholarly papers in Nature discussing the 11 April quakes.
These vast segments of the Earth's rigid outer shell are converging on each other at a rate of about 5-10cm/yr.
The elongated Indo-Australian, which comprises much of the Indian Ocean floor, dives under the Sunda, which carries the Indonesian island.
It is friction at their boundary - the sticking and unsticking, and the sudden release of stored energy - that is at the root of so many violent quakes, such as the magnitude 9.1 event on 26 December 2004 that set off a catastrophic tsunami.continue reading
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