The fate of Lombok Island in the middle of the ring of fire, hit by a series of powerful earthquakes

News24xx.com - The latest tremor comes two weeks after a shallow 6.9-magnitude quake on August 5 damaged tens of thousands of homes, mosques and businesses across Lombok. At least 481 people died and thousands were injured.

The hardest-hit region was in the north of the island, which has suffered hundreds of aftershocks.

A week before that quake, a tremor surged through the island and killed 17.

The disasters have raised fears that Lombok's key tourism industry would take a beating, but the international airport was operating normally Monday.

"People have been arriving and leaving Lombok as usual since last night -- there's been no sudden rush of people trying to get out," said I Gusti Ngurah Ardita, general manager of Lombok Praya International Airport.

Indonesia sits on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire", where tectonic plates collide and many of the world's volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur.

The Australian and Eurasian plates, which sit under the archipelago, have been colliding and putting stress on key area fault lines, according to a geologist.

"Clearly there are different parts of the fault that are moving at the moment releasing those stressors," said Chris Elders, an expert in plate tectonics and structural geology at Curtin University in West Australia.

In 2004 a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.3 undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra in western Indonesia killed 220,000 people in countries around the Indian Ocean, including 168,000 in Indonesia.

 

 

 

 

 

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