Powerful 7.4 magnitude earthquake strikes Indonesia’s Molucca Sea region, tsunami waves possible, USGS says

A powerful magnitude 7.4 earthquake has struck in the Molucca Sea region northeast of Indonesia, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. 

The quake, which hit early Thursday local time, had a depth of nearly 22 miles and its epicenter was 79 miles west-northwest of Ternate, Indonesia, the USGS said.

The U.S. tsunami warning system said tsunami waves were possible in neighboring countries.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 280 million people, sits on major seismic faults and is frequently hit by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions because of its location on the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.

In 2022, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake killed at least 602 people in West Java’s Cianjur city, the deadliest one in Indonesia since a 2018 quake and tsunami in Sulawesi killed more than 4,300 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.