8.2 / 8.5 Quake off Sumatra
 

This happened about 11.10 pm local ( 4.10 UTC

8.2 would be apparently be only 10% of force of the Dec 26th one.

Oh my god. Here we go again. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said this aftershock from Dec.'s quake had the potential to generate a "very destructive tsunami." They've already issued tsunami warnings through Malaysia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and are evacuating coastlines 600 miles from the center.

There's an ex-pat living in Sumatra who appears on this board from time to time-I hope she and her family are allright.

Hopefully as is now 2 hours beyond when the quake occured reports from Banda Aceh say no major problems and they feel that as 2 hours has passed it looks like this quake hasn't caused any Tsunami which they say would have occured by now if there was to be one so hopefully it will be ok.

I never realised how common quakes were until I saw this link:

http://www.iris.edu/seismon/last30days.phtml

Shows just how many occur somewhere in the world every day.

They are saying that this is an aftershock from the earlier big quake, though the biggest and longest (2 minute) aftershock they've had. It's on the same fault line. They have issued a tsunami warning for a 600 mile radius, but there have been no reports of a tsunami (yet, anyway). Coastal areas have been evacuated as a precaution.

The Tsunami Warning Center stated it would take some 3 hours for a tsunami to reach Sri Lanka, by around 4pm EST. This quake has been measured by the USGS as 8.5, the one in Dec. as a 9.

Well, apparently there's been a revision upwards to magnitude 8.7, with dozens reported dead already within Indonesia.