A 5.9 magnitude earthquake was recorded at North Maluku province in the eastern region of Indonesia in the morning of 20 February.

A house collapsed during a quake in West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia in August 2018 (Illustrative photo: VNA)

According to Indonesia’s Agency for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics, the quake’s epicentre, at a depth of 30km, was about 130km to the southwest of Ternate city.

There has been no report about damages caused by the quake so far.

Indonesia is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, as the archipelago nation straddles the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, where tectonic plates collide and a large portion of the world’s volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur.

It suffered its deadliest year in more than a decade in 2018 as a series of earthquakes and tsunamis killed more than 3,000 people.

In 2004, a big earthquake off the northern Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a tsunami across the Indian Ocean, killing 220,000 people in 13 countries, including more than 168,000 in Indonesia.

(Source: VNA)