The earthquake, which struck at 11:20 a.m. local time on Tuesday, was centered in the Flores Sea, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Maumere, one of the largest towns on Flores Island, which is west of Timor-Leste (East Timor).

Indonesia’s seismological agency BMKG put the preliminary magnitude for Tuesday’s quake at 7.4. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), however, put the magnitude at 7.3, down from an earlier reading of 7.6. Both said the earthquake struck at a shallow depth of 12 to 18 kilometers (7 to 11 miles).

Tsunami warnings were immediately issued for nearby coastlines, prompting scores of people to flee to higher ground. The warnings were later downgraded to tsunami advisories, which were canceled at 1:25 p.m. after only small tsunami waves had been recorded.

The USGS estimates that up to 21 million people could have felt Tuesday’s earthquake, of which 347,000 people may have felt “moderate” shaking and “strong” shaking for about 2,000 people. Homes were reportedly damaged on Selayar Island, but there were no immediate reports of casualties.

Indonesia is on the so-called ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’, an arc of fault lines circling the Pacific Basin that is prone to frequent and large earthquakes.

A 9.1-magnitude earthquake, one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded, struck off the west coast of Sumatra in December 2004, causing a massive tsunami that struck countries across the Pacific Ocean. At least 227,898 people were killed.

Source: https://bnonews.com/index.php/2021/12/powerful-quake-southern-indonesia-tsunami-alert-canceled/

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Residents scrambled to higher ground or to evacuate coastal towns late Wednesday and early Thursday after a massive earthquake struck off Alaska’s coast, triggering aftershocks and now-canceled tsunami warnings.

Pat Branson, mayor of Kodiak, the major city of Alaska’s Kodiak Island, told CNN the magnitude 8.2 earthquake was the strongest in the area since the 1960’s. The quake triggered the area’s third evacuation in 18 months.

If the magnitude 8.2 estimate holds, the quake may be the most powerful in North America since a magnitude 8.7 earthquake in Alaska, Brian McNoldy, senior research associate at University of Miami’s Department of Atmospheric Science, said on Twitter.

Wednesday’s quake hit 56 miles east southeast of Perryville, Alaska, at about 8:15 p.m, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The earthquake was felt throughout the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak, the Alaska Earthquake Center said.

At least two strong aftershocks with preliminary magnitudes of 6.2 and 5.6 occurred within a half hour of the first quake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Based on preliminary seismic data, the earthquake may have caused light to moderate damage and probable moderate shaking.

The U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center early Thursday canceled a tsunami warning issued for parts of the state.

“Remember, strong and unusual currents may continue for several hours,” a tweet from the center said. “If you have damage, please report it to your local officials.”

The tsunami warning was canceled after waves of less than one foot arrived onshore, The Anchorage Daily News reported.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center previously issued a notice saying the potential threat to Guam and American Samoa was still under investigation. The U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center later alerted that no significant tsunami is expected and California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska are “all clear.” A tsunami warning issued for Hawaii was also canceled.

Kodiak police advised residents to move to higher ground following the earthquake and added the local high school was open as an evacuation location.

People took to social media to share videos of themselves evacuating homes and moving to higher ground amid blaring warning sirens.

In Sand Point, Alaska, Patrick Mayer, superintendent of schools for the Aleutians East Borough, told the Anchorage Daily News he was sitting in his kitchen when the shaking started.

“It started to go and just didn’t stop,” he told the newspaper. “It went on for a long time and there were several aftershocks, too. The pantry is empty all over the floor, the fridge is empty all over the floor.”

Mayer said he evacuated to the local school, which was located on higher ground.

Jeremy Zidek, a spokesman for the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, told the newspaper he expects any damage from the earthquake may be revealed later in the morning.

The Anchorage Daily News reported that the earthquake was the third major quake in the area in 13 months.

Alaska is located along the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire, which is a horseshoe-shaped geological disaster zone and hotbed for tectonic and volcanic activity.

The state was previously hit by the strongest earthquake ever recorded in North America: the 9.2-magnitude Good Friday earthquake in 1964 that led to 131 deaths and $2.3 billion in property loss, according to the USGS.

Contributing: The Associated Press.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Alaska earthquake: Tsunami warning lifted after 8.2 magnitude quake

Source: https://news.yahoo.com/alaska-earthquake-may-most-powerful-123242517.html

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A 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island on April 12, 2009. USGS

A 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island Friday, prompting tsunami warnings that were later lifted.

The strong quake was centered at a depth of 10.5 miles below the surface and hit near a cluster of islands off the east coast of Central Sulawesi, according to the United States Geological Survey.

About 310,000 people were within a 62-mile radius of the earthquake’s center, according to the Global Disaster and Alert Coordination System. Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysical Agency warned of a possible tsunami after the quake, which struck at 6:40 p.m. local time, but said at about 8 p.m. that the threat was over.

Earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions are common in Indonesia due to its proximity to the seismically-active Pacific “Ring of Fire.”

A 7.5-magnitude quake that hit the opposite side of Sulawesi last year, triggering a tsunami, killed more than 4,000 people and devastated the city of Palu. Although the city is far from the epicenter of Friday’s quake, people there felt it, and ran into the streets panicking, The Associated Press reported.

Elisha Fieldstadt

Elisha Fieldstadt is a breaking news reporter for NBC News.

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Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/6-8-magnitude-earthquake-indonesia-coast-prompts-tsunami-warnings-n993786

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 The quake struck at a shallow 10km deep Photograph: Theo Rouby/AP

A tsunami warning has been issued for the Pacific island of New Caledonia, after a shallow 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck off the country’s coast, prompting warnings that hazardous tsunami waves up to three metres high could reach New Caledonia and Vanuatu.

The earthquake was a shallow 10km (6 miles) deep and occurred about 155km (95 miles) southeast of the Loyalty Islands, which are part of New Caledonia, a French territory, on Wednesday afternoon local time.

“Based on the preliminary earthquake parameters, hazardous tsunami waves are possible for coasts located within 1,000km of the earthquake epicenter,” warned the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC), saying waves could reach between one and three metres high.

Earthquakes are generally more destructive when the focus is near the surface, however there were no initial reports of damage or destructive waves.

The New Caledonian high commission initially issued a tsunami warning for all of New Caledonia, ordering the “immediate evacuation” of people to refuge areas and the “application of safety instructions”, with residents being alerted by urgent text message, which instructed them to go to refuges.

“If you don’t have time to prepare your evacuation, get more than 300m away from the coast and/or get to a height of more than 12m,” warned the Directorate for Civil Protection and Risk Management of New Caledonia (DSCGR).

“We activated the alert sirens… along the east coast and all the Loyalty Islands,” Eric Backes, director of the islands’ civil defense authority, told local radio.

“People should move away from the coastline and to higher ground or go to the evacuation points set up in each commune.”

The DSCGR warned people not to use their vehicles, told them to leave their children at school where they would be taken care of by teachers and not to clog the telephone lines.

The DSCGR later downgraded the warning, saying evacuation was not required for the west coast of the country, in particular Noumea, the capital. But they warned residents to “remain vigilant over the entire coastal strip due to possible abnormal sea level movements”.

At 5:45pm local time, they said “sea movements” were expected for three hours until 8:45pm, and that the end of the alert would be announced by sirens.

Basile Citre, a municipal official on the Loyalty Island of Mare, said the situation there was so far under control.

“I was in a meeting at the town hall and we felt a small tremor then a bigger one,” he told AFP.

“The building shook, but there was no damage. When the sirens sounded, the population headed for higher ground for safety. For now, nothing serious has happened.”

The PTWC said initial tsunami waves could arrive between 4:42pm UTC and 5:39pm UTC but warned that the actual arrival time of the wave could differ from this and warned that “a tsunami is a series of waves and the time between waves can be five minutes to one hour” and that the initial wave may not be the largest and most dangerous in the series.

New Zealand authorities issued a tsunami warning after the quake, but that was quickly rescinded.

A spokesman for the Vanuatu Geohazards Observatory said the sparsely populated island of Tanna was expected to be most affected part of the country but no evacuations had been ordered.

“There are no sirens on Tanna but the people on the island are familiar with these situations and they will have taken precautions and gone to higher ground,” he told AFP.

There were no immediate reports of damage from the initial earthquake and according to the US Geological Survey modelling, damage from the quake is expected to be minimal in terms of loss of life.

Waves reaching 0.3m to 1m above tide level could reach some coasts of Fiji, warned the PTWC.

The PTWC said government agencies should inform coastal populations who are at risk, in line with their procedures and told people located in threatened coastal areas to “stay alert for information”.

• This article was amended on 6 December 2018. An earlier version said earthquakes are more destructive when the “epicentre is near the surface”. Epicentres are by definition at the surface; the word intended was “focus”.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/05/earthquake-tsunami-warning-vanuatu-new-caledonia-76-magnitude

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The Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has declared three days of national mourning after the strongest earthquake to hit the country in a century left at least 65 people dead and destroyed thousands of buildings.

A major rescue operation is under way around the epicentre of the quake in the southern states of Chiapas, Tabasco and Oaxaca, where many are feared trapped under the rubble.

More than 600 aftershocks have been recorded since the earthquake struck off Mexico’s southern Pacific coast just before midnight on Thursday local time. Mexican officials have now upgraded the quake to 8.2 in magnitude.

The death toll was raised on Saturday, as more victims were registered in the poor southern states hardest hit by the disaster, authorities said.

Luis Felipe Puente, head of Mexico’s national emergency services, said three more bodies had been found in the state of Chiapas and another in Juchitán, the coastal town in neighbouring Oaxaca that suffered the greatest loss of life. A third of Juchitán’s homes collapsed or were badly damaged.

Peña Nieto visited the town, which is located in one of the poorest parts of the country, on Friday. Many residents decided to spend the night outside for fear aftershocks would cause further damage.

Rescue teams were continuing to search for survivors with sniffer dogs and heavy machinery across the affected states.

In Juchitán, four people including two children were pulled alive from the rubble of a hotel in the centre of the city, but officials said they had also found many bodies.

“We are all collapsed, our homes and our people,” the Juchitán resident Rosa Elba Ortiz Santiago said. “We are used to earthquakes, but not of this magnitude.”

Peña Nieto said authorities were working to re-establish the water supply and provide food and medical attention to those in need, and that the government would help with reconstruction.

He asked people to avoid “slopes affected by the earthquake” in areas where Tropical Storm Katia has made landfall further north in Veracruz.

Power was cut to more than 1.8 million people after the quake, and authorities closed schools in at least 11 states to carry out safety checks.

The Mexican interior ministry said 428 homes were destroyed and 1,700 were damaged in Chiapas alone.

“Homes made of clay tiles and wood collapsed,” said Nataniel Hernández, a human rights worker living in Tonala, Chiapas, who worried that the bad weather could bring more structures down.

“Right now it is raining very hard in Tonala, and with the rains it gets much more complicated because the homes were left very weak, with cracks,” he said.

The quake triggered tsunami warnings and some high waves, but they did not cause any major damage. Authorities briefly evacuated a few residents of coastal Tonala and Puerto Madero because of the warning.

In Mexico City, windows were broken at the airport and power went out in several neighbourhoods, but the capital escaped major damage.

The tremor appears to have been stronger than the magnitude 8.0 earthquake in 1985 that levelled large parts of Mexico City, killing 5,000 people and destroying 10,000 houses.

Much of the capital is built on the soft soil of a former lake bed, making it vulnerable to earthquakes. Building codes have been tightened since 1985, and earthquake drills for apartment dwellers and office workers have become common.

Public officials were quick to provide updates on damage and give instructions, unlike in 1985 when the country’s politicians were nowhere to be seen and residents, many left homeless, fended for themselves and teamed up to pull people out of the rubble.

The Mexican seismological authority said the quake was 19km deep and triggered a series of magnitude 6 aftershocks.

“Chiapas is historically a very seismic state due to the interaction of five tectonic plates,” it said in a report on the earthquake. The state has suffered three tremors above magnitude 7 since 1970, including one on 7 November 2012 that measured 7.3.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/09/mexico-declares-three-days-of-mourning-after-deadly-earthquake

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