Major offshore quake causes tsunami scare in Chile, Argentina

Major offshore quake causes tsunami scare in Chile, Argentina

View of Puerto Williams, Chile in January 2024

A strong offshore earthquake caused a tsunami scare in the far south of Chile and Argentina on Friday, with authorities evacuating residents of coastal areas for hours before scaling back the threat level.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) said the quake struck in the Drake Passage between the southern tip of South America and Antarctica at a shallow depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles).

The USGS put the magnitude at 7.4, slightly below the 7.5 reported by Chile's National Seismological Center.

It struck at 9:58 am local time (1258 GMT), and several smaller aftershocks were also recorded, but there were no reports of injuries or material damage.

The epicenter was 219 kilometers from the city of Ushuaia in Argentina and a similar distance from the Chilean town of Puerto Williams. 

Chile's emergency agency Senapred issued a tsunami warning and ordered the evacuation of coastal areas of the remote southern Magallanes region.

But within two hours, the agency had lifted the evacuation order.

"The preventive evacuation is over. That means everyone can return and resume their activities," Juan Carlos Andrade, Senapred's director in Magallanes, said, while adding that fishing was suspended until further notice.

Situated at the southern tip of South America, the Magallanes region is Chile's second largest but is sparsely populated.

It lies adjacent to Argentina's Tierra del Fuego Province, home to Ushuaia, a major jump-off point for expeditions to the Antarctic.

- 'Felt the bed moving' -

Sofia Ramonet told AFP was asleep when she "felt the bed moving a lot" in her third-floor apartment in Ushuaia.

"I looked up at the ceiling where I have a hanging lamp and it was moving from one side to the other. It lasted a considerable amount of time, a few minutes."

When she looked out the window she saw "a lot of people outside their homes" who were "scared because they didn't know what was happening or what to do."

There was no evacuation order for Ushuaia.

But residents of Puerto Almanza, a village 75 kilometers to the east on the Beagle Channel, which separates the main island in Tierra del Fuego archipelago from smaller islands and which could act as a funnel for a wave surge, were ordered to move to higher ground.

All nautical activities in the Beagle Channel were suspended, Tierra del Fuego's secretary for civil protection told AFP.

The quake was felt 160 miles as the crow flies north of Ushuaia in the Chilean town of Porvenir on the Strait of Magellan.

"I didn't give it much thought until the alarms sounded. It caused a bit of chaos because it's not normal to feel tremors here," Shirley Gallego, a 41-year-old fishing plant operator told AFP.

- A history of quakes -

Chile is one of the countries most affected by earthquakes.

Three tectonic plates converge within its territory: the Nazca, the South American, and the Antarctic plates. 

On X, several videos showed people evacuating their homes in Puerto Williams, the town closest to the quake's epicenter.

police on its X account showed an officer pushing a person in a wheelchair up a hill in the town of 2,800 inhabitants while other videos shared on X showed people walking up a hill.

In 1960, the southern Chilean city of Valdivia was devastated by a magnitude 9.5 earthquake, considered the most powerful ever recorded, which killed 9,500 people. 

In 2010, an 8.8 magnitude quake off the coast of central Chile, which triggered a tsunami, left more than 520 dead.

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Originally published as Major offshore quake causes tsunami scare in Chile, Argentina