Year's Biggest Quake Shakes Ocean Floor Off Australia
linkBy Gemma Daley and Demian McLean
Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) -- An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 8.1, the year's strongest, shook the ocean floor today between Australia and Antarctica.
The quake struck about 1:59 a.m. at the epicenter about 800 kilometers (613 miles) south of Australia's Tasmania island state. It was the first this year to exceed a magnitude of 8. An 8.1 quake in Mexico City in 1985 killed about 9,500 people and left extensive damage.
``If this happened underneath a population center in Australia it would have destroyed the city,'' Cvetan Sinadinovski, a seismologist at Geoscience Australia, said in Canberra. While earthquakes of this magnitude can produce giant ocean waves, or tsunamis, there is ``no evidence of that yet'' with this quake, he said.
Organizers of the Dec. 26 Sydney-Hobart yacht race said they weren't expecting the quake to affect the 1,010-kilometer contest, which they describe as the world's most grueling long ocean race.
``The earthquake was horizontal not vertical, so seismologists say there will be no wave effect,'' Peter Campbell, a spokesman for the race, said in an interview in Sydney. ``Everything is going ahead as planned and this is the least of our worries at the moment.''
The U.S. government's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said on its Web site that ``widely destructive'' tsunamis from the quake were possible in the open ocean and authorities in the region should be ``aware of this possibility.''
The nearest human outpost is Macquarie Island, a small, rocky isle 490 kilometers to the south that 22 Australian researchers share with seals. Today's quake was located at 50.24 degrees south latitude, 160.13 degrees east longitude.
The quake occurred about 6 miles below the seafloor, according to the U.S. earthquake center's analysis. The next- largest quake in 2004 was a magnitude 7.5 temblor that struck eastern Indonesia on Nov. 11, killing 23 people and leaving almost 8,000 homeless, according to the national government.