CANBERRA, Dec. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- An earthquake measured 8.1 on the Richter Scale, the world's biggest in almost four years, was registered near Macquarie Island of Australia early Friday morning.

    The epicenter was 400 kilometers off Macquarie Island and 800 kilometers off the coast of the state of Tasmania.

    Macquarie Island is part of Tasmania. It is 1,500 kilometers south-east of the island of Tasmania and 1,300 kilometers north of the Antarctic continent.

    The quake was felt throughout Tasmania and shook buildings there, but a group of Australian scientists in an Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) scientific station on Macquarie Island did not feel it.

    AAD spokesman Tony Press said AAD staff phoned the station immediately after they were aware of the quake but nobody felt anything about the quake in the station.

    "We grabbed hold of a couple of people having breakfast this morning and they didn't know anything about it," he said.

    Seismologist Cvetan Sinadinovski said there was no danger to structures anywhere because the quake struck so far off the coast.

    "This was an inter-plate earthquake between Indo-Australian and Pacific plates," he said.

    It was the biggest quake since one occurred off the coast of Peru in early 2001, according to Sinadinovski. Enditem