Indonesia Earthquake 2015

The Indonesian province of Papua had experienced a powerful earthquake of magnitude 7.0 recorded by the U.S Geological Survey. The earthquake just struck off on 27/7/2015 at 06.41 a.m. local time where the epicentre was 250 kilometres west of the provincial capital Jayapura and was at the depth of 52 kilometres. As the area is largely vegetated and mountainous region, there was no tsunami warning issued after the Earthquake. The Australian government and Hawaii tsunami monitoring system has declared the no tsunami threat. In March 2012 a 6.2-magnitude earthquake struck the region without any tsunami warning issued or loss or reports of damage. One of Irian Jaya’s worst earthquakes was in 1981, which killed at least 305 people and displaced more than a 1,000 villagers in the district of Kurina Areal, near the border of Papua New Guinea. 

Quakes in this region with strong magnitudes are common. In May of last year a 5.0 magnitude Indonesia quake erupted just after 8:40 pm local time tonight. This quake was forty miles below sea level. USGS tells news that this region is filled with fault lines. “At its northern and southern terminations, subduction at the Manila Trench is interrupted by arc-continent collision, between the northern Philippine arc and the Eurasian continental margin at Taiwan and between the Sulu-Borneo Block and Luzon at the island of Mindoro.” They add “The Philippine fault, which extends over 1,200 km within the Philippine arc, is seismically active. The fault has been associated with major historical earthquakes, including the destructive M7.6 Luzon earthquake of 1990 (Yoshida and Abe, 1992). A number of other active intra-arc fault systems are associated with high seismic activity, including the Cotabato Fault and the Verde Passage-Sibuyan Sea Fault (Galgana et al., 2007).”

An official of the Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said the quake was felt across the province and that the strongest hit area was Sarmi, a town on the northern coast of the island, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage. But it did cause panicked residents to ran out of their homes, said Sutopo Purwon Nugroho, a spokesman for the National Disaster Mitigation Agency. Indonesia is prone to earthquakes due to its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire." A massive earthquake off Sumatra island in 2004 triggered a tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries, mostly in Indonesia's Aceh province.

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