Quake activity along the San Andreas fault is picking up

Strong 7.3 magnitude quake hits PNG

From: AAP
December 14, 2011 4:43PM


A 7.3 magnitude earthquake has hit Papua New Guinea.

A spokesman from Geoscience Australia confirmed the earthquake had occurred on land north of Port Moresby.

Geoscience Australia's website said the quake could be felt by people 1,523 kilometres away.

It says damage may have occurred within a 122-kilometre radius.

An AAP corespondent reported that the windows of the parliament building shook for about 1.5 minutes, however there appears to be no damage. The earthquake comes on a day of political upheaval.

The quake happened at 4.04pm (AEDT). Witnesses in Port Moresby said people came running out of buildings, power lines swayed and parked cars rocked.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did not issue a tsunami alert.

Strong earthquakes are relatively common in Papua New Guinea. The country lies on the Ring of Fire - an arc of earthquake and volcanic zones that stretches around the Pacific Rim.

Geoscience Australia senior seismologist Clive Collins said aftershocks were expected, given the size of the earthquake.

Mr Collins said the town of Wau, with a population of about 5000, was the closest to the quake — only 20 kilometres away.

He said damage to small villages and landslides were expected.

The quake occurred in a remote mountainous region, 40 kilometres inland from the coast.

"There are no reports of people losing lives yet," he said.

20:44 27/12/2011
MOSCOW, December 27 (RIA Novosti)
Tags: earthquake, Tuva, Russia

A 6.5-magnitude earthquake that hit the southern Siberian republic of Tuva on Tuesday caused no damage or casualties, a spokesman for the regional Emergencies Ministry said.

“Everything is all right. Our dispatchers work round the clock and they did not receive any calls on any destruction,” the spokesman said.

One of the local citizens residing on the 9th floor of a multi-storey residential building said everything was shaking so intense that the wardrobes in his apartment were about to fall down.

According to the geophysical service of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the epicenter of the quake was registered at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) some 120 km (75 miles) to the east of the city of Kyzyl at around 11:20 p.m. local time [15:20 GMT].

The ministry’s spokesman also said that local residents were warned about the possibility of aftershocks and were advised to leave their homes.

A spokesman for MRSK Siberia power grid company said that power supplies in the region were not damaged by the quake.

Tectonic Summary

The January 10, 2012 earthquake off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia, occurred as a result of strike-slip faulting within the oceanic lithosphere of the Indo-Australia plate, approximately 100 km to the southwest of the major subduction zone that defines the plate boundary between the Indo-Australia and Sunda plates offshore Sumatra. At the location of this earthquake, the Indo-Australia plate moves north-northeast with respect to the Sunda plate at a velocity of approximately 52 mm/yr.

While they are rare, large strike-slip earthquakes are not unprecedented in this region of the Indo-Australian plate. Since the massive M 9.1 earthquake that ruptured a 1300 km long segment of the Sumatran megathrust plate boundary in December of 2004, two Mw 6.2 strike-slip events have occurred within 50 km of the January 10 2012 event, on April 19 2006, and October 4 2007. These events seem to align with fabric of the sea floor in the diffuse boundary zone between the Indian and Australian plates.

7.3 Quake Hits Indonesia; No Damage Seen
By Femi Adi - Jan 10, 2012

A magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck west of Sumatra, Indonesia shortly after midnight, causing residents to flee their homes and prompting a brief tsunami warning. No damage or injuries were immediately reported.

The temblor struck at 12:37 a.m. local time about 420 kilometers (260 miles) southwest of Banda Aceh at a depth of 29 kilometers, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its website.

“People panicked and ran out of their houses, and some headed for the hills,” Satrio Happrobo, an operational staff member at the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency’s Banda Aceh office, said by phone. The provincial capital sustained no damage to buildings and there were no reports of injuries, he said. A local tsunami warning was lifted at 3 a.m.

Indonesia, a country of more than 17,000 islands, is prone to earthquakes as it forms part the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines surrounding the Pacific Basin.

A 7.5-magnitude temblor and resulting tsunami struck the Kepulauan Mentawai region of Indonesia, about 240 kilometers from Padang, the provincial capital of West Sumatra, on Oct. 25, 2010, leaving least 113 people dead and 150 others missing

A 7.6-magnitude earthquake in the same area in October 2009 left more than 1,000 people dead in Padang, many of whom were buried in mudslides and the rubble of collapses buildings. Less than a month earlier, a magnitude-7 temblor south of Java on Sept. 2 left 82 people dead.

A tsunami generated by a magnitude-9.1 earthquake off northern Sumatra in December 2004 left about 220,000 people dead or missing in 12 countries around the Indian Ocean.

A magnitude 7 earthquake carries about as much as energy as 199,000 tons of TNT, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.