The earthquake, which has since been downgraded from a 7.6 to a magnitude of 7.4, struck at a local time of 6.48am a depth of 35km. Its epicentre was 127 kilometres (79 miles) west-northwest of Ternate, in the archipelago’s North Maluku province, which has a population of over 205,000, according to USGS.
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The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said that hazardous tsunami waves were possible “within 1,000km of the epicentre” along the coasts of Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. USGS also warned of tsunami waves reaching 0.3 metres to one metre (3.2ft) above the tide level were possible for some of the Indonesian coastline.
In further advice, the US tsunami warning system forecast waves of less than 30 centimetres above tide level for the coasts of Guam, Japan, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and Taiwan.
Japan’s meteorological agency added that “slight sea level changes” may occur along along the nation’s coast, but that no tsunami damage was expected.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said there was no tsunami threat to the Australian mainland, nor its islands or territories.
Indonesia, a vast archipelago of islands on which more than 280 million people live, sits on major seismic faults and is frequently rocked by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions thanks to its positioning on the Ring of Fire, a 40,000-kilometre (25,000-mile) horseshoe-shaped belt around the Pacific Ocean. The Ring of Fire is home to 75% of the world’s volcanoes and 90% of its earthquakes.
In 2022, a shallow 5.6-magnitude quake left more than 600 people dead in West Java’s Cianjur city, the deadliest one in Indonesia since a 2018 quake and tsunami in Sulawesi killed more than 4,300 people.
In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean quake set off a tsunami on Boxing Day that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province.
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