CANBERRA, Australia – A powerful magnitude eight earthquake hit the Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands yesterday, but no tsunami was reported hours after the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued an alert for nearby islands.
The quake struck at a depth of 167 kilometers under Papua New Guinea’s most eastern province of Bougainville, where the two South Pacific countries meet in a continuous archipelago, said Chris McKee, assistant director of Papua New Guinea Geophysical Observatory in Port Moresby.
There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.
The greatest tsunami threat had been to Bougainville and that threat had passed without any report of a tsunami, McKee said. “I suspect that because of the great depth of the earthquake, there was probably no significant tsunami.’’
Solomons government official George Herming said he was not aware of any major tremors being felt in his country or any tsunami.
The countries are located in the Pacific’s geologically active “Ring of Fire.’’
Meanwhile, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said yesterday there is no tsunami threat in the country following the magnitude eight earthquake that struck Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea
“No destructive Pacific-wide threat exists based on the historical and tsunami data. However, earthquakes of this size sometimes generate local tsunamis that can be destructive along coast located within a hundred kilometers of the epicenter,” Phivolcs said in a tsunami advisory. (AP and Aytch dela Cruz)