Chilean authorities issued a tsunami warning for the country’s southernmost region Friday morning and both Chile and Argentina ordered evacuations after a major 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of South America.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) said the quake struck in the Drake Passage at a shallow depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), 219 kilometers from the city of Ushuaia in Argentina and a similar distance from the Chilean town of Puerto Williams.
It placed the magnitude at 7.4, slightly below the 7.5 reported by Chile’s National Seismological Center.
It struck at 9:58 am local time (1258 GMT), and several smaller aftershocks were also recorded.
“ATTENTION! #SENAPRED, due to the threat of a tsunami, requests the evacuation of the sector of the coastline of the # Magallanes Region,” Chile’s emergency agency SENAPRED wrote on its social media account.
President Gabriel Boric echoed the call for the “evacuation of the coastline throughout the Magallanes region” on his X account.
Authorities in Argentina’s far-south Tierra del Fuego province, said the quake was felt mainly in Ushuaia and called for residents to evacuate a nearby village on the Beagle Channel.
Authorities in both Tierra del Fuego and Magallanes in Chile said there had been no reports of damage or injuries so far.
Chile is one of the countries most affected by earthquakes.
Three tectonic plates converge within its territory: the Nazca, the South American, and the Antarctic plates.
The wave train generated by Friday’s earthquake is expected to reach the coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula and the southern tip of South America in the coming hours, with estimated heights of between 0.3 meters and 1 meter, according to the Chilean Navy.
The first places these waves could reach are the Chilean military bases Bernardo O’Higgins and Arturo Prat, in Antarctica, it added.
Situated at the southern tip of South America, the Magallanes region is Chile’s second largest but is sparsely populated, and lies adjacent to Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego Province.
The governor’s office of Tierra del Fuego in Argentina said “the earthquake was felt primarily in the city of Ushuaia and, to a lesser extent, in other towns throughout the province.”
While urging calm, it called on residents in and around the town of Puerto Almanza, about 75 kilometers east of Ushuaia on the Beagle Channel, “to preventively evacuate the area and move to higher, safer ground.”
On X, several videos showed Chileans evacuating their homes in Puerto Williams, the town closest to the quake’s epicenter.
Chile’s police on its X account showed an officer pushing a person in a wheelchair up a hill in the town of 2,800 inhabitants.
Other videos shared on X showed people in the town walking up a hill, under sunny skies.
“The preventive evacuation was carried out well, with no incidents so far reported,” Juan Carlos Andrade, director of SENAPRED in Magallanes, told reporters.
In 1960, the southern Chilean city of Valdivia was devastated by a magnitude 9.5 earthquake, considered the most powerful ever recorded, which killed 9,500 people.
In 2010, an 8.8 magnitude quake off the coast of central Chile, which triggered a tsunami, left more than 520 dead.
