Chilean authorities said they regretted the spread of panic with a misguided tsunami warning calling for people to leave coastal areas after an earthquake in Antarctica.
The Interior Ministry said on Twitter that a magnitude 7.1 quake occurred at 20.36 local time, 216 km northeast of the Chilean scientific base O’Higgins, and called for the evacuation of the coastal regions of Antarctica 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 was sent in error.
“We want to provide reassurance to the population, tell them that it is not necessary to evacuate the entire national territory, only the Antarctic base,” Miguel Ortiz of the ministry’s National Emergency Office told a news conference.
He said the agency regretted the inconvenience caused by its messages, which it blamed for a technical error.
The tsunami warning for Antarctica was later lifted.
People in coastal cities like La Serena, north of Santiago, and Valparaiso, began leaving areas near the coast after the warning until reports began to appear that it was a false alarm.
But as Chileans reacted to the warning, a second 5.6-magnitude quake struck the Chile-Argentina border region at 9:07 p.m., the GFZ German Geosciences Research Center said, at a depth of 133 km 30 km east of Santiago.
No damage was reported from any of the quakes.
The second was near the Andean and Teniente copper mines of Codelco and Los Bronces of Anglo American PLC.
Chilean mining regulator Sernageomin said workers, mines and mining facilities had not reported problems after the quake.
Sernageomin said that after the first earthquake, 80 people were evacuated from Chile’s main base in Antarctica, President Eduardo Frei Montalva’s base on the Fildes Peninsula, west of King George Island, and 55 plus three other bases, along with five foreign bases.
The army said no damage was reported to the Antarctic base.
Chile is one of the countries with the most earthquakes in the world. Right on the coast, the Nazca tectonic plate sinks beneath the South American plate, pushing the imposing Andes mountain range to ever higher altitudes.
In 2017, one million people were evacuated from their homes after an 8.3-magnitude earthquake.
The strongest earthquake on record occurred in Chile in 1960 when a magnitude 9.5 earthquake killed more than 5,000 people.