A tsunami alert for the Pacific has been cancelled following a series of powerful quakes off Vanuatu, today. These quakes follow on from a week of devastation caused by earthquakes in our region. Below Australian experts respond.

For information on the most recent quakes visit the US Geological Survey website

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Adam Pascale is Head of Seismology at Environmental Systems & Services (Victorian based)

“In any randomly distributed population of events, clusters become apparent over time. The current levels of activity are unusual but not uncommon. Events of this frequency and magnitude (and worse) have occurred in the past and will continue to do so for millennia. The presence of humans has not changed the intensity and frequency of these large, catastrophic events. The surface of the earth will continue to move and change, and it will do so more dramatically and more often in the areas that are already known to us as highly active. A few hundred years of earthquake records and thousands of years of investigated history have helped define the areas of greater risk from earthquakes, which are the areas of the earth where the tectonic plates collide.

There is nothing that people can do to prevent these events, but there is much that can be done to prepare for them to reduce the impact on human life. Public education about earthquake and tsunami safety will prevent loss of life in the short term, and adoption and enforcement of earthquake-compliant building standards in areas of high seismic risk will save lives and infrastructure in the longer term.”

Dr Huilin Xing is from UQ’s Earth Systems Science Computational Centre (ESSCC)

On the earthquakes off the coasts of Samoa and Sumatra.
“From the observations, there were similar correlations of the quakes in the different places. For two great earthquakes to occur within hours in such a way, it is abnormal. From research, we can expect that if an earthquake is larger than magnitude 6.5 there may be a tsunami.

Australia is mostly surrounded by subduction zones. If a large subduction earthquake occurred in the deep water regions such as south of New Zealand or west of the Solomon Islands, it would impact the eastern coast of Australia.”

Kevin McCue is President of the Australian Earthquake Engineering Society (Canberra based). He is an adjunct professor at CQUniversity and Director of the Australian Seismological Centre

“An active morning for earthquakes.

In my opinion the earthquakes of the South West Pacific, Samoa last week and Vanuatu this week, are causally related. The Sumatra earthquakes are too far from the South West Pacific and more probably related to the 2004 earthquake to the north on the Australian plate boundary segment there.

This sequence is not abnormal for a plate boundary and whilst it is not possible to guess where earthquakes will happen in the near future, countries from Papua New Guinea to New Zealand would probably be wise to dust off their response plans. That includes Vanuatu, south of this morning’s activity, especially the Port Vila area which is exposed to tsunamigenic earthquakes.

The classic case of earthquakes sequentially rupturing a large section of a plate boundary is the Anatolian Fault through Turkey which has ruptured from one end to the other since 1939.

In an average year we see one earthquake of magnitude 8 or greater so this is a more active year than normal.

The risk of a damaging tsunami striking the east coast of Australia has probably not changed with the recent earthquakes.”