By Olivia Day For Daily Mail Australia
21:14 28 May 2024, updated 21:50 28 May 2024
A magnitude 2.1 earthquake has rocked a small town in Far North Queensland.
Residents in Tully, 750km north of Brisbane, were left shaken after the quake hit 8.7km away from the town at about 8.02pm on Tuesday.
One local said the sound was ‘like a big fire igniting’ while others said the impact rattled the dishes on their sink and shook the floor.
Some residents in Wangan, 50km north of Tully, reported hearing the earthquake.
‘We heard it in Wangan. Was so loud,’ one person wrote on social media.
The small quake was recorded in the Alcock Forest Reserve, on the outskirts of Tully, and had a very shallow depth of 10km.
It was followed by a larger 5.7 magnitude earthquake off the west cost of northern Sumatra in Indonesia, more than 4,000km away.
In the 2016 census, the small town of Tully had a population of 2,390 people.
Tully, about a two-hour drive south of Cairns, has a reputation for being one of the wettest towns in Australia with an average rainfall of over 4,000mm.
The town holds the record for the highest-ever annual rainfall in a populated part of Australia with 7,900mm of rain recorded in 1950.
The quake comes just hours after a 5.6 magnitude earthquake shook the Solomon Islands on Monday – the third recorded off the Australian coast in 24 hours.
The tremor was at a depth of 35km and the epicentre was at a distance 79km south of Panguna, Papua New Guinea.
It came after a magnitude 6.6 earthquake shook Tonga at about 9.30am local time.
The quake was at a depth of 112km and the epicenter was at a distance of 70km northwest of Fangale’ounga, Ha’apai on Foa Island, the USGS reported.
Vanuatu was rocked by a magnitude 6.4 quake around 9.30am local time on Sunday.
The undersea quake occurred north of the capital, Port Villa, about 9.23am local time at a depth of 32km, the government-run Geoscience Australia portal states.
The island nation is 3600km off the coast of north-eastern Queensland and is home to about 340,000 people.
The quake in Tully follows another small earthquake which impacted parts of Canberra and New South Wales on Friday.
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