Authorities in Chile have said they regret the spread of panic with a false tsunami alert asking people to come out of the coastal areas after an earthquake in Antarctica.
The Interior Ministry said on Twitter that a 7.1-magnitude quake struck at 20:26 local time, 216 km northeast of the O’Higgins Chilean scientific base, and called for the coastal regions of Antarctica to be evacuated due to a tsunami -risk.
The ministry also sent a message to mobile phones across the country urging people to leave coastal areas, although the ministry later said it had been sent incorrectly.
“We want to give the people peace of mind and tell them that it is not necessary to evacuate the entire national territory, but only the Antarctic base,” Miguel Ortiz of the Ministry’s National Emergency Office said at a news conference.
He said the agency regrets the inconvenience caused by the messages, which he blamed for a technical error.
The tsunami warning for Antarctica was later lifted.
People in coastal cities, including La Serena, in northern Santiago and Valparaíso, began leaving areas near the coast after the warning until reports began to turn out to be a false alarm.
But when Chileans responded to the warning, a second 5.6-magnitude earthquake struck the Chile-Argentina border region, at 9:07 p.m., the GFZ German Geoscience Research Center said at a depth of 133 km and 30 km east of Santiago.
No damage was reported to any earthquake.
The second one was near Codelco’s Andina and Teniente copper mines and Anglo American PLC’s Los Bronces.
Chilean mining regulator Sernageomin said workers, mining operations and facilities after the quake reported no problems.
Sernageomin said that after the first earthquake, 80 people from Chile’s main base in Antarctica, the Presidents Eduardo Frei Montalva base on Fildes Peninsula west of King George Island, and 55 more from three other bases, along with five foreign bases , has been evacuated.
The military said no damage was reported at the Antarctic base.
Chile is one of the world’s most earthquake countries. Just off the coast, the Nazca tectonic plate dives beneath the South American plate, pushing the towering Andes cordillera to ever-higher altitudes.
In 2017, one million people were evacuated from their homes after an earthquake of 8.3.
The strongest earthquake recorded was in Chile in 1960 when more than 5,000 people died in a magnitude 9.5 earthquake.