The earth just will not stop moving in New Zealand’s Fiordland region, which has been shaking since a quake measuring 7,1 on the Richter scale — equal to the fifth largest in the world this year and felt 1 800 kilometres away in Australia — struck two weeks ago.
There have been 19 aftershocks of magnitude 5 or more since the early-morning quake on August 22 cracked walls and cleared supermarket shelves in the lakeside resort of Te Anau.
But one registering 6,1, which shredded already frayed nerves in the region on Thursday night, prompted even normally sanguine seismologists to express ”mild surprise”.
Noting that a magnitude 6,2 tremor had occurred two hours after the first quake, seismologist Warwick Smith, of the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, said on Friday: ”It’s rare to see two aftershocks of this size in a sequence.”
The initial quake was the biggest recorded in New Zealand — one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries — since 1968 and only 10 bigger shakes have struck in more than 150 years.
It would have been devastating if centred near a city, but there were no injuries or serious damage because Fiordland, at the eastern foot of the South Island, is lightly populated.
The Earthquake Commission, a state-owned insurer that pays compensation for earthquake damage, said most claims it had received were for relatively minor things like cracked walls and roofs and broken items thrown off shelves.
Smith said it was not possible to attach any significance to the aftershock sequence ”other than it is slightly unusual” and said aftershocks were likely to continue for weeks, or even months, but would gradually become less frequent.
Meanwhile, a strong earthquake jolted the Indonesian province of Aceh on Friday morning, but there were no immediate reports of structural damage or injuries, officials said.
The quake, measuring 5,8 on the Richter scale, rocked Aceh, on the northern end of Sumatra, at about 8.23am (1.23am GMT), said an official of the meteorology and geophysics office in Jakarta.
Fadli said the earthquake’s epicentre was in the Indian Ocean, about 10km southwest of Tapaktuan, a district town 30km south from provincial Banda Aceh. The quake took place at about 240km beneath the sea bed.
Indonesia, is located in the Pacific volcanic belt known as the ”Ring of Fire”, where earthquakes and volcanoes are common. — Sapa-DPA