Huge earthquake rattles Tasmania

[AussieMark]

Huge earthquake rattles Tasmania

TASMANIA felt the power of the world's biggest earthquake in four years yesterday, but escaped damage.

Measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale, it would have flattened a major city -- possibly Hobart, if it had been closer to land.
The quake's epicentre was 800km south of the island state in the Southern Ocean, just 400km north of Macquarie Island.

Buildings across Tasmania shook for up to 15 seconds when the quake struck just before 2am.

No one was injured and no buildings were damaged.

A Tasmanian police spokesman said emergency services received a handful of calls, with people reporting shaking houses, swinging light fittings and a sound "like a washing machine mid-cycle".

The quake also woke people on the south island of New Zealand.

"If it happened underneath a population centre in Australia, this would probably have destroyed a whole city," seismologist Cvetan Sinadinovski said.

"In terms of size, this could have been more than 30 times stronger than the Newcastle event of 1989."

He said tremors were common in the Macquarie Rise region, occurring every one or two years.

"This was an inter-plate earthquake between Indo-Australian and Pacific plates," he said.

"The last earthquake of similar magnitude in the Macquarie Rise region was in 1924."

Globally, yesterday's quake was the strongest since June 2001, when more than 120 people were killed after an earthquake measuring 8.4 struck less than 200km off the coast of Peru.

But 22 Australian scientists working on remote Macquarie Island in the sub-Antarctic slept through it.

"Nobody felt anything," said Tony Press, Australian Antarctic Division spokesman.

He said AAD staff phoned the base immediately after being made aware of the quake.

"We grabbed hold of a couple of people having breakfast this morning and they didn't know anything about it," he said.

An aftershock registering 6.1 hit at 6.50am, with more likely to follow, Dr Sinadinovski said.

- with AAP

[Brent]

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