Jakarta:
A 6.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia’s remote Maluku islands Thursday, the United States Geological Survey mentioned, but no tsunami warning was issued.
The robust quake hit at a somewhat shallow depth of 31 kilometres (20 miles), about 127 kilometres southwest of the city of Ternate.
Shallower quakes have a tendency to bring about more harm, but there had been no quick reports of casualties.
“It was a decent shake, but people weren’t panicking,” mentioned Ternate resident Nasarudin Amin.
“There are warnings about potential aftershocks.”
Indonesia experiences frequent quakes due to its position on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity exactly where tectonic plates collide that stretches from Japan via Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.
In January, more than one hundred people today had been killed and thousands left homeless by the 6.2-magnitude quake that struck Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, decreasing buildings to a tangled mass of twisted metal and chunks of concrete in the seaside city of Mamuju.
A effective quake shook the island of Lombok in 2018 and numerous more tremors followed more than the next couple of weeks, killing more than 550 people today on the vacation island and neighbouring Sumbawa.
Later that year, a 7.5-magnitude quake and a subsequent tsunami in Palu on Sulawesi island left more than 4,300 people today dead or missing.
In 2004, a devastating tremor measuring 9.1 magnitude struck off the coast of Sumatra and triggered a tsunami that killed 220,000 all through the area, like about 170,000 in Indonesia.
The Boxing Day catastrophe was one of the deadliest organic disasters in recorded history, and lifted the ocean floor in some locations by 15 metres.
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