A powerful earthquake of magnitude 7.8 has struck off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the US Geological Survey (USGS) has said.
Indonesian and Australian authorities called off their tsunami alerts within two hours of the tremor, though it was still unclear if the quake had destroyed any buildings or killed people in Sumatra.
The epicentre was 502 miles (808km) south-west of Padang, USGS said. It was 15 miles deep.
Andi Eka Sakya, head of Indonesia’s meteorology and geophysics agency, said there was only a small potential for a tsunami. “I think potential for a tsunami is very small,” because the quake didn’t occur along a major fault known as a subduction zone, he told TVOne.
The quake was felt strongly in Padang in West Sumatra for a few seconds, an Agence France-Presse journalist in the city said. People ran out of their homes to get to higher ground.
However, USGS said there was a “low likelihood of casualties and damage”. “There are likely to be no affected structures in this region,” the organisation added on its website.
The shallower a quake, the more likely it is to cause damage. USGS originally put the magnitude at 8.2, and then 8.1, before lowering it to 7.9 and then 7.8. They initially said the quake was six miles deep, but later corrected it to 15 miles.
Indonesia, badly affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, straddles the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, a highly seismically active zone where different plates on the earth’s crust meet and create a large number of earthquakes and volcanoes.
Photo and information from The Guardian
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