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One person has been killed after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia’s Ternate island, damaging buildings and triggering small tsunami waves.

The quake, which had a depth of 35km, occurred on Thursday at 6.48am local time, according to the United States Geological Survey. Its epicentre was 127km (79 miles) west-north-west of Ternate, an island in Indonesia’s North Maluku province.

The US tsunami warning system initially alerted to the risk of hazardous tsunami waves within 1,000km of the epicentre, including along the coasts of Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, saying waves reaching 0.3 metres to 1 metre (3.2ft) above the tide level were possible on some of the Indonesian coastline.

About two hours after the quake, it confirmed the threat of a tsunami had passed.

Strong shaking lasting 10 to 20 seconds was felt in Bitung – a coastal city on the north-eastern edge of Sulawesi island – and surrounding areas, as well as in Ternate city, according to Indonesia’s disaster management agency (BNPB).

Tsunami waves were recorded in five locations, according to Indonesia’s BMKG meteorology agency, which said the highest – at 0.75 metres (2.46ft) – occurred in North Minahasa in North Sulawesi province. A total of 11 aftershocks were monitored, the largest at a magnitude of 5.5.

The authorities have urged the public to remain vigilant. “At this stage, caution is still required, particularly for communities living along the coast,” a spokesperson for BNPB said in a statement, telling residents to refrain from returning to beaches or coastal areas until authorities confirmed it was safe to do so.

A 70-year-old woman died in North Sulawesi’s Minahasa district, and another resident was injured after the quake.

Images showed a sports complex in North Sumatra that was damaged, with mangled wall panels and metal bars lying across the ground outside.

BNPB said initial assessments showed “minor to moderate” damage to buildings in areas of Ternate, which has a population of about 205,000. A church in the Batang Dua Island district was damaged, as were two houses in South Ternates. In Bitung, efforts to assess the damage were continuing, the agency said.

The quake was initially recorded at a magnitude of 7.8, the US Geological Survey said.

Japan’s meteorological agency said “slight sea level changes” might occur along Japan’s coast but that no tsunami damage was expected.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology later confirmed there was no tsunami threat to their territories.

An Agence France-Presse journalist in Manado, North Sulawesi province, said the shaking woke him and others in the city, who rushed outdoors. “I immediately woke up and left my house. People [were] immediately scrambling outside,” he said. “There is a school and the pupils rushed outside.”

He said the shaking persisted for “quite long” but he did not witness “significant damage”.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 280 million people, is prone to earthquakes because of its location on the “ring of fire”, an arc of volcanoes and faultlines in the Pacific basin.

In 2022, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake killed at least 602 people in West Java’s Cianjur city, the deadliest one in Indonesia since a 2018 quake and tsunami in Sulawesi killed more than 4,300 people.

In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province.

This area of the Molucca Sea often experiences moderate to large earthquakes, according to the US Geological Survey. Over the past 50 years, nine other earthquakes with a magnitude higher than seven have occurred within 250km of Thursday’s earthquake, though few have caused major damage because of their location at sea.