U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said the threat of a major tsunami hitting the United States “has passed completely.” Noem, speaking in Chile where she is attending meetings with officials, told reporters in the capital, Santiago: “We’re in really good shape right now. We were fully deployed and ready to respond if necessary, but grateful that we didn’t have to deal with the situation that this could have been.”
Scientists have anticipated the eruption for some time, with the volcano’s crater filling with lava for weeks and the mountain emitting plumes of ash. It last erupted in 2023. The four volcanic islands, known in Russia as the Kurils, stretch between Kamchatka and the Japanese island of Hokkaido.
The islands were captured by the Soviet Union from Japan in the closing days of World War II. Japan asserts territorial rights to the islands it calls the Northern Territories, and the dispute has kept the countries from signing a peace treaty.
Dubbed the “land of fire and ice,” Kamchatka is one of the most active volcanic regions on Earth. It has about 300 volcanoes, with 29 of them still active, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory. Quakes and tsunamis regularly strike the peninsula that lies close to an ocean trench where two tectonic plates meet.
The 1,200-kilometer (750-mile)-long peninsula nine time zones east of Moscow faces the Pacific Ocean on its east and the Sea of Okhotsk along its west coast. Kamchatka and a few nearby islands have a population of about 290,000 with about 162,000 of them living in the regional capital of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in Avacha Bay on the peninsula’s southeast.
Additional aftershocks are possible, putting the entire Pacific Rim on tsunami watch. A tsunami warning remained in effect for parts of the northern California coast. Much of the Pacific coast of North America, spanning from British Columbia in Canada to down the U.S. West Coast and into Mexico was under a tsunami advisory.
In Hawaii, emergency authorities blast alerts to people’s cellphones, on TV and radio and sound a network of sirens. In Alaska, some communities have sirens, and information is available on weather radio or public radio broadcasts.
Bigger aftershocks cannot entirely be ruled out, he added, but their magnitude and frequency normally tend to decrease over time. “You can expect large aftershocks to continue for some time, but the frequency of large, damaging events will reduce as time goes on,” he said.
“There is always a chance of a larger event, but that larger event will usually occur relatively soon after, within days or weeks.” With a relatively shallow depth of 20.7 km (13 miles), Wednesday’s earthquake was always going to create such tsunami risks, experts said.
“It is an offshore earthquake and when you have offshore earthquakes there is the potential for tsunamis,” said Adam Pascal, chief scientist at Australia’s Seismology Research Centre. “If you have a relatively shallow earthquake it is more likely to rupture the surface of the ocean floor,” he told Reuters.
“We’ve seen in some cases you can have large earthquakes like this and not cause a tsunami because they are too deep and the shearing doesn’t express itself at the surface.” The waves reached as far as the town’s World War II monument about 400 metres from the shoreline, said Mayor Alexander Ovsyannikov.
Several people were injured in Russia by the quake, state media reported, but none seriously. “The walls were shaking,” a Kamchatka resident told state media Zvezda.
Japan has downgraded its last remaining tsunami alert, which was in the country’s north. Tsunami advisories remain in place for its Pacific coast following the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck off Russia’s Far East on Wednesday. Russian authorities on the Kamchatka Peninsula and Kuril Islands have canceled their tsunami warnings but say the risk of aftershocks and waves remains.
The 8.8-magnitude earthquake was the strongest to hit that area in Kamchatka since 1952, according to the local branch of the Geophysical Survey of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In a statement posted on their Telegram channel, they called the earthquake a “unique event.” They said the epicenter was near a recent earthquake that struck the peninsula on July 20.
Wednesday’s 8.8-magnitude quake was among the four strongest earthquakes this century, and among the eight strongest since 1900, according to the USGS. The earthquake occurred along the Pacific Ring of Fire, the ring of seismic faults around the Pacific Ocean where most of the world’s earthquakes occur.
The 2011 Japan quake and the 2004 earthquake off Indonesia were 9.1 magnitude, and a 2010 earthquake in Chile also was recorded at 8.8 magnitude.
Shanghai relocated more than 280,000 people, halted hundreds of flights and ferry services and imposed speed limits on roads and railways on Wednesday as a tropical storm whipped eastern China with gales and heavy rain.
Landfall by Co-May in the port city of Zhoushan in Zhejiang province early on Wednesday was soon followed by warnings of a tsunami set off by a powerful earthquake off Russia’s far east, raising concerns of larger-than-expected storm surges along the Chinese coast.