AUCKLAND, New Zealand — Residents of the South Pacific from island chains to Australia were alerted to the possibility of a damaging tsunami on Wednesday after an 8.0-magnitude earthquake off the Solomon Islands, according to scientists and news reports from the area, but the warnings were called off a few hours later.
Ednal Palmer, the chief reporter of the newspaper The Solomon Star in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, said in a telephone interview that reports from Lata, the capital of Temotu Province, were sketchy but indicated that a wave had apparently struck three villages.
“We have heard that a wave 103 centimeters high” — nearly three and a half feet — “has hit Lata, swamping the town, and five people are still missing at the moment,” Mr. Palmer said.
Lata, where the quake struck, is in Temotu Province, where the population is around 30,000. It is a three-hour flight from Honiara, which was not damaged by the earthquake or the tsunami.
Mr. Palmer said Honiara residents were not concerned about the tsunami. “Most of us are getting ready for tonight’s UB40 concert,” he said.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said on its Web site, “Sea level readings indicate a tsunami was generated.” The earthquake struck around 11 a.m. local time in the Santa Cruz Islands, part of the Solomon chain. There were conflicting reports as to the depth of the quake.
The center said the tsunami warning was limited to the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu, New Caledonia, Kosrae, Fiji, Kiribati, and Wallis and Futuna.
A lesser alert, a tsunami watch, was declared for American Samoa, Australia, Guam, the Northern Marianas, New Zealand and eastern Indonesia.
The earthquake was not only powerful but also shallow, giving it significant potential to cause damage, said Barry Hirshorn, a geophysicist with the National Weather Service in Hawaii. Moreover, it was a thrust earthquake, he said, meaning that the sea floor moved up or down, not sideways, contributing to the potential for a dangerous tsunami.
But after the earthquake, as scientists watched to see how far a tsunami might spread, there were few early indications of a major threat beyond the immediate area, Mr. Hirshorn said. A water rise of about three feet had been observed close to the quake, he said, still high enough to be potentially damaging but probably not big enough to threaten distant shores.
In New Zealand, thousands of people were at the beach, swimming in the sea on a glorious summer afternoon on Waitangi Day, a national holiday — quite oblivious to the potential for a tsunami. Tsunami sirens were set off late in the afternoon there, and people in coastal areas were being told to stay off beaches and out of the sea, rivers and estuaries.
The New Zealand Herald reported Wednesday afternoon on its Web site that tsunami sirens in Suva, the capital of Fiji, had been warning people to stay inside or go to higher ground.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported on its Web site on Wednesday that the Solomon Islands’ National Disaster Management Office had advised those living in low-lying areas, especially on Makira and Malaita, to move to higher ground.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 6, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the chief reporter of The Solomon Star. He is Ednal Palmer, not Edmal.
