jakarta: A strong undersea earthquake shook western Indonesia on Monday morning. But there were no immediate reports of serious damage or casualties. The US Geological Survey said the 6.0-magnitude quake was centered 48 kilometers (30 miles) southeast of Singkil, a coastal district in Aceh province, at a depth of 48 kilometers (30 miles). No tsunami warnings were issued by Indonesia’s Agency for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics.
Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 270 million people, is frequently affected by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions because it lies on the Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.
On November 21, a 5.6-magnitude earthquake killed at least 331 people and injured nearly 600 in the city of Cianjur, West Java. It was the deadliest in Indonesia since the 2018 earthquake and tsunami in Sulawesi, which killed some 4,340 people.
In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean earthquake triggered a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Aceh province of Indonesia.