Magnitude 7.4 earthquake strikes in Indonesia, sparking tsunami alert

A magnitude 7.4 earthquake has struck the Northern Molucca Sea region in Indonesia, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.The quake, which hit early on Thursday local time, had depth of 35km and its epicenter was 127km (79 miles) west-northwest of Ternate, Indonesia, the USGS said.The US tsunami warning system said tsunami waves were possible with 1,000km of the epicentre, along the coasts of Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. It warned that 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 30cm above tide level for the coasts of Guam, Japan, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Taiwan.Japan’s meteorological agency said “slight sea level changes” might occur along Japan’s coast but that no tsunami damage was expected.Australia’s bureau of meteorology said there was no tsunami threat to the Australian mainland, islands or territories.An Agence France-Presse journalist in Manado, North Sulawesi province, said the shaking woke him and others in the city, who rushed outdoors. “I immediately woke up and left my house. People [were] immediately scrambling outside,” he said. “There is a school and the pupils rushed outside.”He said the shaking persisted for “quite long” but he did not witness “significant damage”.Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 280 million people, sits on major seismic faults and is frequently hit by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions because of its location on the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.In 2022, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake at least 602 people 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 that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province.