Chilean authorities issued a tsunami warning for the country’s southernmost region Friday morning, after a major 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck in the Drake Passage, the body of water separating South America and Antarctica.
“ATTENTION! #SENAPRED, due to the threat of a tsunami, requests the evacuation of the sector of the coastline of the # Magallanes Region,” Chile’s emergency agency SENAPRED wrote on its social media account.
President Gabriel Boric echoed the call for the “evacuation of the coastline throughout the Magallanes region” on his X account.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) said the quake struck at a shallow depth of 10 kilometers, 219 kilometers from the Argentine city of Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego province and a similar distance from the Chilean town of Puerto Williams.
It placed the magnitude at 7.4, slightly below the 7.5 reported by Chile’s National Seismological Center.
