Jakarta, Indonesia — A moderately strong earthquake on Sunday night shook parts of Indonesia’s main island of Java and the country’s capital. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the shallow earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 5.6 and occurred 37.2 kilometers (23.11 miles) below the surface. The epicenter was 80 kilometers (29 miles) west-southwest of Pelabuhanratu, a coastal city in West Java province.
Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency measured its preliminary magnitude at 5.7 and at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 mi). Variations in early earthquake measurements are common.
The earthquake was strongly felt in several cities and villages and caused panic in some people, said Daryono, director of the agency’s Earthquake and Tsunami Center.
Daryono, who like many Indonesians uses one name, said there was no danger of a tsunami but warned of possible aftershocks.
Skyscrapers in Jakarta, the capital, swayed for several seconds, even two-story houses shook strongly in Bandung, capital of West Java province, and in Jakarta’s satellite cities of Bogor and Bekasi.
Earthquakes occur frequently throughout the sprawling archipelago, but are rarely felt in Jakarta.
Indonesia, a seismically active archipelago of 270 million people, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on major geological fault lines known as the Pacific “Ring of Fire.”
Last year, a 5.6 magnitude earthquake killed at least 602 people in the West Java city of Cianjur. It was the deadliest in Indonesia since an earthquake and tsunami in Sulawesi in 2018 killed more than 4,300 people.
In 2004, an extremely powerful earthquake in the Indian Ocean triggered a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in the Indonesian province of Aceh.