This earthquake was in Vanuatu and is actually one of at least three 7.0 or above today(well, they actually happened tomorrow, or at least when they happened yesterday, it was tomorrow where they happened)--for all who don't realize it, Vanuatu is one of the most seismically active places in the world. We're talking about several respectable quakes a day, though they generally only have one or two a year in the 7.0 or above range). They also have a number of underwater volcanos.

The thing is that, contrary to what we tend to think, the world is a very big place, and a lot of it is unpopulated.   Big quakes happen all the time, just not very close to where there are a lot of people--in fact, up until relatively recently, huge quakes could occur and no one would even know about it.

A lot of people are not aware of this, and sometimes, young or new people in a newsroom will see a a big quake come up on the wire, and get all excited and interrupt programming or something like that, which is probably what happened here.

Given that, though, these are exceptionally high magnitude quakes, even for Vanuatu, and last week, there was an 8.0 quake 120 miles south of Apia, Samoa. This is an unusual peak of activity, and when there is intense activity down at that end, it sometimes seems to start higher levels of activity all around the Pacific rim, first in Indonesia, then the Phillipines, then Japan, through Russia, Alaska, Canada, the US west coast, down through Mexico etc. Some of those places have large populations on the fault lines--so keep your eyes open--