JAKARTA (Xinhua): A 6.0-magnitude earthquake jolted off Indonesia's Maluku province on Monday without generating huge waves, the country's meteorology, climatology and geophysics agency said.
The earthquake occurred at 16:55 Jakarta time (0955 GMT) with the epicenter located 170 km northwest of Kepulauan Tanimbar (Tanimbar Islands) regency and a depth of 153 km beneath the sea floor, the agency reported.
No tsunami alert was issued as the tremors were not expected to trigger large waves.
According to the Maluku provincial disaster management agency, no preliminary reports about damages or casualties have been received, Ismail Usemanu, head of the Operational Unit of the agency, told Xinhua.
Indonesia, an archipelagic nation made of thousands of islands, has been frequently hit off by earthquakes for its position on a vulnerable quake-jolted area called "the Pacific Ring of Fire."
A magnitude 5.6 earthquake on Nov 21 killed at least 331 people and injured nearly 600 in West Java’s Cianjur city. It was the deadliest in Indonesia since a 2018 quake and tsunami in Sulawesi killed about 4,340 people.
In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province. - Xinhua
