Jakarta: Three earthquakes struck Indonesia on Tuesday. An earthquake measuring 5.5-magnitude on the Richter Scale struck North Sumatra province in the morning. The epicenter was located 17 km southeast of North Tapanuli Regency at a depth of 10 km.
Earlier, a 5.7-magnitude earthquake struck Maluku province at 00:32 a.m. local time on Tuesday. 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.
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Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis frequently strike Indonesia, a vast archipelago nation of more than 270 million people because of its location on the ‘Ring of Fire’. The Ring of Fire, or the Circum-Pacific Belt, is a path along the Pacific Ocean characterized by active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes. It is a horseshoe-shaped belt about 40,000km long and about 500 km wide that contains two-thirds of the world’s total volcanoes and 90% of Earth’s earthquakes. Indonesia, an archipelagic country has 127 active volcanoes.
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. 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.
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