An 8.8-magnitude earthquake, one of the strongest ever recorded, struck Russia's Far East early Wednesday, prompting tsunami warnings in coastal towns in multiple countries.

The earthquake was "on what we call the Pacific Ring of Fire. This is a region around the entire Pacific Rim renowned for significant earthquakes," Simon Boxall, lecturer in oceanography at the University of Southampton, told The Associated Press.

"The Earth is made up of these sort of geology plates, these geophysical plates, and the Earth where these plates rub, where they sort of join, we get stresses building up, and then every so often we get a sudden release of pressure and part of the seabed flips up," Boxall said. "And so it's that flip that causes the tsunami. And not all flips, not all earthquakes will

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