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RECENT EARTHQUAKESA magnitude 8.0 quake struck off Samoa on Tuesday. The islands soon were engulfed by four tsunami waves 15 to 20 feet high that reached up to a mile inland. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii said it issued an alert, but the waves got to the islands so quickly that residents only had about 10 minutes to respond. The quake was centered about 120 miles south of the islands of Samoa, which has about 220,000 people, and American Samoa, a U.S. territory of 65,000.
Another strong underwater earthquake rocked Western Indonesia on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the Somoan quake. A 7.6-magnitude earthquake started at sea and quickly rippled through Sumatra, the westernmost island in the Indonesian archipelago. Indonesia sits on a major geological fault zone and experiences dozens of quakes every year. A 6.8 magnitude quake shook Sumatra on Thursday and more aftershocks have been felt. Both quakes originated on the fault line that spawned the 2004 Asian tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen nations.
To learn more about earthquakes, go to
www.weatherwizkids.com/weather-earthquake.htm.
