Index – Foreign – A seven-magnitude earthquake struck the South Shetland Islands

There was a strong earthquake Saturday night in the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica, near Chile’s largest Antarctic base, Eduardo Frei. Chile’s Interior Ministry ruled that the week-long earthquake could trigger a tsunami, so it ordered the evacuation of the base and the adjacent village, Villa Las Estrellas. A few hours later, the tsunami rose.

The earthquake occurred once on Sunday morning, central European time, and its center was 210 kilometers east of the Chilean base in the sea, at a depth of 10 kilometers, said the Chilean Disaster Management Agency.

The base, established on King George Island, belongs to the Chilean Air Force and is located 1,230 kilometers south of the South American continent. Villa Las Estrellas has a hospital, a school, a bank, a small department store, a post office and a chapel. Up to 150 people stay in the area in summer and about 80 in winter.

Disaster Management reported that 80 people were temporarily withdrawn from the Eduardo Frei base and the village, as well as a total of 81 more Chileans from three other smaller bases (O’Higgins, Fildes and Prat), and five foreign bases were evacuated But the authorities did not mention which countries they belonged to and how many people there were.

About half an hour after the strong earthquake, there was another earthquake, independently, at a depth of 122 kilometers, at a depth of 122 kilometers from Santiago, the Chilean capital of 5.9 inhabitants. Disaster management first ordered a tsunami watch for this reason, but soon after announced that it was wrong. Authorities later said that so far no impact from this earthquake had been observed.

Chile is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world: in 2010 there was an 8.8 earthquake in Concepción that killed more than five hundred people, and sixty years ago Chile suffered the worst earthquake in its history, of 9.6 degrees, in the city of Valdivia in the south of the country.