Massive quake felt in Moscow, no casualties

MOSCOW: A massive undersea earthquake yesterday in Russia’s Far East prompted a tsunami warning and unleashed tremors across Russia including in Moscow around 10,000 kilometers away, but caused no casualties or damage. The USGS estimated the quake at 8.3 magnitude and placed its epicenter in the Sea of Okhotsk off the shore of the Kamchatka Peninsula at a depth of more than 600 kilometers (370 miles). Russia issued a tsunami warning for Sakhalin island and its region, urging residents to seek higher ground. But the warning was later lifted with no reports of casualties. The huge magnitude and great depth of the quake meant that its echoes were felt across the Eurasian continent including in the Russian capital itself.

“The whole plate-on which the continent stands-shook,” Anatoly Tsygankov of the state Rosgidromet environmental monitoring service told AFP. “And this movement of the continental plate was felt all over Russia-not just in Moscow, we received calls from Nizhny Novgorod and other cities,” In the nearest city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, around 350 kilome- ters away, the quake was felt to a magnitude of up to 5 but there were no casualties or damage, the emergency situations ministry said. “Aftershocks of a magnitude of up to 2 were recorded in Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk and Novosibirsk regions [of Siberia] as well as several others,” the emergency situations ministry said. The emergencies ministry in Moscow, which is eight time zones away from the region hit by the quake, said it had received reports of chandeliers swinging and water in aquariums shaking as a result of the quake.