Magnitude 7.4 earthquake strikes in Indonesia, sparking tsunami alert | Earthquakes
A. 7.4 magnitude earthquake The United States Geological Survey (USGS) said it hit Indonesia’s Northern Molucca Sea region.
The USGS said the earthquake, which struck early Thursday local time, had a depth of 35 kilometers and its epicenter was 127 kilometers west-northwest of Ternate, Indonesia.
The US tsunami warning system said tsunami waves were possible within 1,000 km of the epicenter along the coasts of Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. It warned that tsunami waves reaching 0.3 meters to one meter (3.2 ft) above tide level were possible for part of the Indonesian coastline.
As further advice, the US tsunami warning system predicts waves less than 30 cm above tide level for the coasts of Guam, Japan, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Taiwan.
Japan’s meteorological agency said there may be “slight sea level changes” off the coast of Japan, but no tsunami damage is expected.
Australia’s meteorological bureau said there was no tsunami threat to the Australian mainland, islands or territories.
An Agence France-Presse correspondent in Manado, North Sulawesi province, said the tremor woke him and others in the city who had gone out. “I immediately woke up and left my house. [were] “They immediately run out,” he said. “There is a school and the students ran out.”
He said the shaking lasted “quite a long time” but he did not witness “significant damage”.
Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 280 million people, lies on major seismic faults and is frequently affected by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions due to its location on the “Ring of Fire”, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.
In 2022, a 5.6 magnitude earthquake in Cianjur, West Java, killed at least 602 people; The deadliest earthquake in Indonesia since the Sulawesi earthquake and tsunami in 2018 killed more than 4,300 people.
An extremely powerful earthquake in the Indian Ocean in 2004 triggered a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, mostly in Indonesia’s Aceh province.
