A magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck 218 kilometres north-northwest of Bamboo Flat, in India’s Andaman Islands, at 08:49 UTC on Thursday, October 29, 2026, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That is 14:19 in the afternoon on India’s clocks. The agency’s record shows a single felt report, an intensity of 1, and a tsunami flag of zero.
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Bamboo Flat is a reference point on the map, not the place that shook. The quake sits well off the village, in the open archipelago to its north-northwest.
Reading the USGS entry for a distant reference point
The USGS names a quake after a nearby populated place, so the label says how far the epicentre lies from that place and in which direction. According to its encyclopedia entry, Bamboo Flat is a village in Ferrargunj Tehsil of South Andaman district, about 13 km from the capital Port Blair, with 7,962 residents at the 2011 census. The catalogue picks the nearest place it lists, so a 218 km gap means the quake lies far from any settlement the catalogue knows about, which points to open water or a sparsely settled stretch of the island chain.
The magnitude is 5.1 and the depth is listed as 10 km. The event page for the quake carries a significance score of 400. Ten kilometres is the figure that appears for more than half of the 29 events in the feed the entry came from, a clustering that usually means the depth was held at a default value because the seismic data could not pin it down. A 5.1 at that depth cannot be taken as a precisely measured shallow rupture.
One felt report and no tsunami flag
The USGS feed for October 29 and 30 counts 29 earthquakes of magnitude 4.6 or greater, and the Andaman event ranks twelfth by size. It is tied at 5.1 with a deep shock under Papua New Guinea and two on the Balleny Islands region far to the south. Within the group it is among the few to draw any public response: one person submitted a felt report that the system scored at an intensity of 1, which means not felt at all in most terms and a rounding of a single answer.
At the top of the same feed sit a magnitude 6.4 shock southeast of Easter Island, a magnitude 6.2 event 142.8 km beneath Vanuatu and a 5.8 in the Philippines, so the Andaman quake belongs to the middle of a typical two-day stretch on a planet that produces about a dozen quakes of this class every day. The feed also shows eight of the other eleven events at 5.1 or higher drew no felt reports at all, which makes the single response here a faint but real sign of human contact with an otherwise remote event.
The entry carries no damage estimate, no alert level and no tsunami warning. Earthquakes of this size do not usually generate a damaging tsunami, since they move too little seafloor, but the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are among the places where the topic is never treated lightly.
The reason is the earthquake of December 26, 2004, which the encyclopedic account of the Indian Ocean disaster puts at magnitude 9.1 by the USGS estimate and 9.2 to 9.3 by more recent studies. Its rupture ran 1,200 to 1,300 km, the longest ever observed, and finished about five minutes after it began at a plate boundary where the fault changes character. The Tsunami Evaluation Coalition’s final report counts 227,898 dead across the Indian Ocean.
Katchal, Little Andaman and the 2004 tsunami
The same account describes the archipelago as unevenly hit. The Andaman Islands were moderately affected, while Little Andaman and the Nicobar Islands were severely damaged, with the tsunami arriving within minutes. On Katchal Island, 303 people were confirmed dead and 4,354 were missing out of 5,312 residents. The ground itself moved: the islands shifted about 1.25 m to the southwest and sank about 1 m. Many Andaman tribes evacuated on the strength of oral traditions about earthquakes and the sea, and suffered fewer casualties as a result.
Moderate earthquakes in the same region are routine, which is why a magnitude 5.1 draws little attention. A wire report from May 2019, carried by the Free Press Journal, described a medium-intensity quake of magnitude 5.1 at a depth of 10 km in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, citing the National Center for Seismology as its only source and calling the region a high seismic zone. The numbers match this week’s event almost exactly,, which shows how ordinary this size of event is for the islands.
What the USGS record leaves open is the one thing Indian readers would most want settled. It names no local agency, so there is no official statement to quote on whether the National Center for Seismology measured the same size or placed the epicentre in the same spot. Until that bulletin is public, the 5.1 and the 218 kilometres are the USGS’s numbers alone.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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