An undersea earthquake of magnitude 6.0 struck western Indonesia on Monday morning, but it did not trigger a tsunami warning. There were no reports of serious damage or casualties.
The earthquake was centered 48 km southeast of Singkil along the coast in Aceh province. The US Geological Survey said that its depth was felt to be 48 kilometers underwater. 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 due to its location 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.
(With inputs from PTI)
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