The quake struck at 12.49pm Western Indonesia time and its epicentre was at a depth of 66km around 177km west of the city of Tual in the eastern Maluku province, USGS said.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was no tsunami threat, and Indonesia’s geophysics agency said in a social media post the quake “did not have the potential to cause a tsunami”.

There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.

The vast archipelago nation experiences frequent earthquakes due to its position on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity where tectonic plates collide that stretches from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

A magnitude 6.2 quake that shook Sulawesi in January 2021 killed more than 100 people and left thousands homeless.

In 2018, a magnitude 7.5 quake and subsequent tsunami in Palu on Sulawesi killed more than 2,200 people.

And in 2004, a magnitude 9.1 quake struck Aceh province, causing a tsunami and killing more than 170,000 people in Indonesia.