Philip Haydon tweeted: “Wow, huge earthquake in Taipei right now, biggest I’ve ever felt…” Vivienee Wei added: “Strong earthquake in eastern Taiwan. Felt shaking in Taipei.”
The European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) initially said the quake, which struck off the island’s coast on Monday evening at 5.46pm local time (9.46am GM), measured 6.0 in magnitude.
This was later scaled back to 5.7.
The EMSC said the tremor occurred at a depth of 1.6 miles (two kilometres).
Taiwan, just 200 miles from the Chinese mainland, is located within the Pacific Ring of Fire, a seismologically volatile region with stretches all the way round the Pacific basin.
In 2018, buildings collapsed in the Taiwanese city of Hualien after the island was hit by a 6.4 magnitude tremor, with 277 people injured and 17 killed.
Two years earlier, 550 people were hurt and 117 lost their lives as the result of a quake which also measured 6.4.
In 1999, an island-wide earthquake killed 2,415 people, with 51,711 buildings collapsing.
Elsewhere in the Pacific today, the remote island of Vanuatu was struck by a magnitude 6.1 earthquake, the EMSC confirmed earlier.
The quake had a depth of 85.75 miles (138 km).
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