JAKARTA (Reuters): An earthquake of magnitude 6.4 struck Northern Sumatra, Indonesia, on Saturday, the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) said.
The quake was at a depth of 158 km (98.18 miles) GFZ said.
Earlier on Saturday, a powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia, collapsing buildings and homes, killing at least 38 people and causing panic in a region prone to deadly quakes.
Authorities issued a tsunami warning but later lifted it when Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency said monitoring showed no significant sea-level changes that would pose a threat to coastal communities.
Indonesia experiences frequent earthquakes due to its location in the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity stretching from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.
Flores was struck by a 7.7-magnitude earthquake in 1992, which triggered a tsunami and resulted in around 2,500 deaths.
A devastating 9.1-magnitude tremor in 2004 struck off the coast of Sumatra and triggered a tsunami that killed 220,000 throughout the region, about 170,000 of them in Indonesia, in one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.
In 2018, a powerful quake shook the holiday island of Lombok followed by several more tremors, killing over 550 people.
Later that year, a 7.5-magnitude quake and a subsequent tsunami on Sulawesi island left more than 4,300 people dead or missing. – REUTERS/AFP
