In Reply to: the REAL indonesia :) posted by Cinta_Indonesia on Thursday, 9. August 2007 at 01:40 Bali Time:
Powerful earthquake shakes buildings violently in Indonesian capital
JAKARTA (AP): A powerful undersea earthquake rattled Indonesia's capital early Thursday, violently shaking tall buildings and sending panicked residents fleeing into the streets, officials and witnesses said.
There were no immediate reports of damage, and geophysicists said there was little risk of a tsunami.
The temblor, which struck just after midnight, had a preliminary magnitude of 7.5 and was centered 110 kilometers east of Jakarta at a depth of around 290 kilometers, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Residents said tall buildings and single-story homes shook violently in the city of 9 million, and water sloshed from swimming pools. Many people were woken up by the power of the quake, and screamed "Allah Akbar" or "God is great" as they ran outside.
The jolt could be felt from Indonesia's westernmost island of Sumatra to Bali in the east, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage, most likely because of its depth, local officials said.
It was also felt in parts of Malaysia, said Don Blakeman, a geophysicist at the USGS National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado.
Because the quake's epicenter was deep beneath the Java Sea, there was little risk of a tsunami, said Robert Cessaro, a geophysicist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, adding however that there were no instruments "very close" to the epicenter.
The Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake that triggered a massive tsunami off the coast of Sumatra and killed more than 131,000 in Indonesia's Aceh province was only 30 kilometers deep, according to the USGS.
"The earthquake center in 2004 was close enough that it actually ruptured the surface of the sea floor, which caused a tsunami," said John Bellini, another USGS geophysicist. "This one was felt by people on the ground, and it shook buildings, but it was too deep tocause the ocean bottom to move."
Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.