A massive undersea earthquake Friday in Russia's Far East prompted a tsunami warning and unleashed tremors across Russia including in Moscow around 7,000 kilometres away, but caused no casualties or damage. The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimated the quake at 8.3 magnitude and placed its epicentre in the Sea of Okhotsk off the shore of the Kamchatka Peninsula at a depth of more than 600 kilometres (370 miles).
Russia issued a tsunami warning for Sakhalin island and its region, prompting residents to leave their homes for higher ground. But the warning was lifted minutes later, with no casualties. "I was sitting at my work desk and it started shaking like this," a young woman from Sakhalin island said in televised remarks, rocking her arms. "It was scary to be honest." "I don't know what it was, but my sofa shook a bit," an elderly woman added in remarks broadcast on Rossiya 24 television.
The quake was felt most strongly in the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, around 560 kilometres away, but there were no casualties or damage, the emergency situations ministry said. "It shook for a long time and it was quite scary. The walls were rocking and the chandelier shaking," one elderly woman resident told Channel One television. 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." Aftershocks were also recorded in the Siberian regions of Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk and Novosibirsk, the emergency situations ministry said.
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