Sydney - XINHUA
A shallow 6.9 magnitude earthquake has struck 186 kilometers southwest of Dadali, Solomon Islands, on Monday, the USGS and Geoscience Australia confirm on Monday.
Authorities have confirmed that due to the location of the earthquake, widespread damage is unlikely.
"It's between Bougainville and the Guadalcanal Islands," Duty Seismologist at Geoscience Australia Hugh Glanville told Xinhua.
"The ones that have caused more damage and the only issues in that region have been from those highly populated islands, it's sort of halfway in-between and right on the fault boundary."
Glanville said the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center have issued a nil-threat for a tsunami based on available data for that region, likewise for Australia.
"It's just over the threshold, so it's possible it could [cause a tsunami], but very unlikely to," Glanville said.
Authorities have said there could be localized damage on those islands, but they're very sparsely populated, if populated at all.
"It's a very common quake we've been having in that region for the past 10, 20 years," Glanville said.