Three earthquakes shake Indonesia, one death reported in North Sumatra

The 5.5-magnitude quake struck North Sumatra province at 5:22 a.m. local time on Tuesday. The epicenter was located 17 km southeast of North Tapanuli Regency at a depth of 10 km

Jakarta: Three earthquakes struck Indonesia on Tuesday, with a 5.5-magnitude tremor hitting North Sumatra province in the morning, and two earlier quakes in Maluku and East Nusa Tenggara, the country’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency reported.

The 5.5-magnitude quake struck North Sumatra province at 5:22 a.m. local time on Tuesday. The epicenter was located 17 km southeast of North Tapanuli Regency at a depth of 10 km.

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“One person was killed, and another was injured. Several houses and a road were severely damaged and the road is now impassable for transport,” head of the emergency, equipment, and logistics unit of North Sumatra Provincial Disaster Management Agency Sri Wahyuni Pancasilawati told Xinhua. She added that risk assessments were underway.

Earlier, a 5.7-magnitude earthquake struck Maluku province at 00:32 a.m. local time on Tuesday. The agency initially recorded its magnitude at 6.0 before revising it downward, Xinhua news agency reported.

Ten minutes later, a 5.2-magnitude earthquake struck East Nusa Tenggara province. No tsunami alert was issued following the three earthquakes, as the tremors were not expected to generate large waves.

Indonesia, an archipelagic country with 127 active volcanoes, frequently experiences earthquakes due to its location within the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire.

Some of these earthquakes are very large, such as the magnitude 9.1 quake off the west coast of Sumatra that generated the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. This earthquake occurred along the Java-Sumatra subduction zone, where the Australian tectonic plate moves underneath Indonesia’s Sunda plate.

But to the east of Java, the subduction zone has become ‘jammed’ by the Australian continental crust, which is much thicker and more buoyant than the oceanic crust that moves beneath Java and Sumatra.

Due to the large number of shallow earthquakes along the plate boundaries, Indonesia is particularly vulnerable to tsunamis. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than 165,000 people along the coast of Sumatra, and in 2006 over 600 people were killed by a tsunami impacting the south coast of Java.