A shallow magnitude 6.9 earthquake has struck in the sea off northern Vanuatu.<\/p>\n
The quake, initially reported as a 7.2 magnitude, hit at 3.31pm on Saturday, about 200km west of Sola, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). It had a depth of 10km.<\/p>\n
Sola, on the island of Vanua Lava, is the main town in the Banks Islands at the top of the Vanuatu archipelago. The epicentre lay north-west of Espiritu Santo, home to the country\u2019s second city, Luganville.<\/p>\n
There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.<\/p>\n
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said hazardous tsunami waves were possible for parts of Vanuatu, with no threat area identified for New Zealand at this stage.<\/p>\n
Earthquakes are common in Vanuatu, a low-lying archipelago that straddles the tectonic Ring of Fire, an arc of seismic activity stretching through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A shallow magnitude 6.9 earthquake has struck in the sea off northern Vanuatu. The quake, initially reported as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":639992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[8215,42,43,6430,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-639991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-earthquakes","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-pacific-islands","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/639992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}