Tsunami Alert Issued After Indonesia Earthquake
Posted February 13, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Indonesia issued a tsunami alert Wednesday after a strong earthquake rocked the east of the country.
The country’s geophysics agency says an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.6 struck about 270 kilometres southwest of the Maluku island chain at a depth of 9.6 kilometres.
The agency said the earthquake had ‘the potential’ to cause a tsunami.
It was not immediately clear whether the warning had reached villages possibly in danger in the remote region.
Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago with 17,500 islands, is prone to seismic upheavals because of its location on the so-called Pacific `Ring of Fire,’ an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.
A giant quake off Indonesia ‘s Sumatra island in 2005 spawned the tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in 11 countries, more than half of them in Indonesia .
