Magnitude 6.4 earthquake recorded west of Australia’s Macquarie Island
Island was also hit with 6.9 magnitude quake two weeks ago
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Your support makes all the difference.A magnitude 6.4 earthquake has struck the west of Australia’s Macquarie Island.
The island, about 1,600km southeast of Tasmania, felt the earthquake late on Saturday night.
No damage has been reported so far.
The earthquake had a depth of 10km and is believed to have been felt shortly after 11pm.
A 6.9 magnitude earthquake also hit the island two weeks ago, briefly placing Australia on tsunami watch.
The island is part of Australia and is governed by Tasmania.
Macquarie Island became a Tasmanian State Reserve in 1978 and was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.
Sitting on the boundary between the Australian plate and the Pacific plate, the island has a long history of seismic activity.
A 6.8 magnitude earthquake was felt in December last year, while devastating quakes with magnitudes 8.2 and 8.1 were respectively recorded in 1989 and 2004.
Elsewhere, a powerful 7.2 magnitude earthquake rattled large areas of Peru and Bolivia on 26 May.
The quake struck southern Peru in the Andes mountains, north of Lake Titicaca, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS).
More recently, an earthquake of magnitude 6.1 struck the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan on June 1 killing four people.
The quake struck Lushan county, near the city of Yaan, at 5pm (0900 GMT) and was at a depth of 17km, the state television quoted China Earthquake Networks Center as saying.
The epicenter is 113 kilometres from Sichuan’s capital Chengdu.
A strong earthquake measuring about 6.9 on the Richter scale jolted a remote county in northwest China’s Qinghai province in January this year.
The 6.9-magnitude quake struck the mountainous part of the province at 1.45am, with an epicentre at 37.77 degrees north latitude and 101.26 degrees east longitude, according to the China Earthquake Networks Center (CENC).
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