Residents in Darwin have reported waking to pictures falling off the walls and cars shaking in the driveway after a powerful deep-sea earthquake struck a small archipelago in Indonesia during the early hours of Tuesday morning.

The Bureau of Meteorology said the 7.5 magnitude tremor hit the Tanimbar region, a province in eastern Indonesia about 600 kilometres north of Darwin, around 3.30am. The region sits on the Pacific “ring of fire”, an arc of seismic faults in the Pacific Ocean where earthquakes and volcanoes are common.

The shockwaves were felt in the Australian mainland shortly after, with more than 1000 people telling Geoscience Australia they felt the quake.

Darwin resident Trevor Power, who was lived in the territory’s capital for more than four decades, told the Nine Network it was the worst earthquake he had ever experienced.

His remarks were echoed by territory-based singer Vassy Karagiorgos.

“We ran out of the house in the middle of the night. I’ve never experienced an earthquake that lasted that long and felt so strong,” she wrote on social media. “It was rather scary.”

Power said he scooped up his family and pets and raced outside the cyclone-proof home for safety. The car was shaking in the driveway, and he could hear the tremor’s roar, he said.

“Our houses are built to withstand cyclones and the house shook,” he said.

“It started shaking, and then she really started shaking. It shook to the point you could actually hear the windows starting to rattle inside of it and creak.”

Power said the whole episode, which he described as “rather violent”, lasted about two minutes.

Former senator and athlete Nova Peris said she felt the entire house shaking “like crazy” and pictures came off the walls when the tremor struck.

“Holy shit! That earthquake was freaking scary as,” she wrote on Twitter.

Nine reporter Olivana Lathouris, who is based in Darwin, said thousands of people had reported feeling the tremor in the Gove Peninsula in Arnhem Land, and Katherine.

Locals also felt the ground shake in the Kimberley town Kununurra, on the other side of the West Australian-NT border, and in the coastal mining town of Weipa, on Cape York in far-north Queensland.

The Bureau of Meteorology said there was no threat of a tsunami hitting Australia as a result of the earthquake, the epicentre of which was recorded at a depth of 95 kilometres in the ocean.

With AP

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