No Tsunami after Quake off Papua New Guinea
Date: 13-Dec-05
Country: AUSTRALIA
Local PNG authorities said there were no reports of damage from the quake which occurred at 00:20 a.m. on Monday (1420 GMT Sunday).
"There was no tsunami generated according to local observers," a spokesman for the Geophysical Observatory in the PNG capital Port Moresby.
"This was a shallow earthquake in the ocean and was barely felt on land."
The US Geological Survey (USGS) said on its Web site that the quake was located in the New Britain area of the country, which lies north of Australia and east of Indonesia. The USGS had earlier put the magnitude of the earthquake at 6.8.
Geophysicist Don Blakeman at the USGS National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado, told Reuters by phone the quake occurred "in the crust of the ocean, not on land".
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii said there was no risk of a Pacific-wide tsunami but initially warned the undersea quake could generate localised destructive tsunamis.
In July 1998, two undersea quakes measuring 7.0 created three tsunamis that killed at least 2,100 people near the town of Aitape on Papua New Guinea's north coast.
Seismically active, Papua New Guinea lies on "the Ring of Fire", a zone of volcanic activity which accounts for 75 percent of the world's active and dormant volcanoes.