Strong quakes rattle South Pacific , no damage

Sydney, May 28 : Two strong earthquakes shook the South Pacific today but there were no reports of major damage or injury and seismologists said they did not signal an increase in seismic activity in the quake-prone region.

The quakes in Tonga and Papua New Guinea hit within 10 minutes but were unrelated to a strong quake on Indonesia's main island of Java yesterday which killed more than 3,000 people, seismologists said.

There were no immediate fears of tsunamis being generated by either of today's quakes, which were both deep below the Earth's surface, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii said.

Tonga, an island nation of some 169 islands and 115,000 people, was hit by a quake measuring 6.7 in magnitude at 0436 hrs local time (0336 GMT), US and Australian seismologists said.

It came 10 minutes after a quake with a magnitude of 6.2 off the remote and sparsely populated New Britain island in the east of Papua New Guinea, one of the most seismically active regions in the world.

''I think this is pretty typical,'' Geoscience Australia seismologist Spiro Spiliopoulous said of the two quakes.

''Statistically it's probably a little unusual to get two quakes of this size occurring within half an hour of each other but I'm not getting any reports of damage,'' he told Reuters.

The Tonga quake was located about 145 km (90 miles) northeast of the capital Nuku'alofa and was most likely related to a larger quake measuring 7.9 in magnitude which hit without causing major damage on May 3.

''It's part of the aftershock sequence of the big event a few weeks ago,'' Spiliopoulous said.

The May 3 quake generated a small tsunami of about half a metre but caused panic across the Pacific, with memories still fresh of the huge December 2004 tsunami which left 230,000 people dead or missing across large parts of Asia.

It caused evacuations in New Zealand and Fiji and was followed by a 6.0 aftershock the next day.

On May 16-17, Pacific Basin countries staged Exercise Pacific Wave 2006, a tsunami warning drill that revealed mixed results including an overloaded telephone network in Thailand and a faulty fax machine in Malaysia.

Spiliopoulous said the latest quake had been centred too far away from the Tongan capital to cause major damage.

One woman in Nuku'alofa, who asked not to be identified, said the quake had been felt but it had not been big enough to cause any major concern.

The Tonga islands are an archipelago east of Australia, southeast of Fiji and northeast of New Zealand, with a total land area about four times the size of Washington, DC.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center initially registered the PNG quake with a magnitude of 6.7. It was estimated at a depth of 39 km (24 miles), while the Tonga quake was put 50 km (31 miles) below the surface.

Papua New Guinea lies on ''the Ring of Fire'', a zone of volcanic activity which accounts for 75 per cent of the world's active and dormant volcanoes.

Reuters