A powerful and shallow 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck off the Indonesian island of Sumatra Wednesday, officials said.

The U.S. Geological Service said the temblor was centered "in the ocean" at a depth of 6.2 miles and put its epicenter at 500 miles southwest of Padang, the capital of West Sumatra province.

A spokesman for Basarnas, Indonesia's national search and rescue organization, told NBC News there had been panic in some areas after the quake but no reported deaths.

Shallow earthquakes tend to cause more damage. No damage has yet been reported from Wednesday quake, said Andi Eka Sakya, the head of Indonesia's Agency for Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics.

Indonesia issued a tsunami warning following the event, according to Reuters. However, a geophysicist with the USGS said it had not gotten a warning from the Tsunami Warning Center.
"Usually that leads us to believe there isn't going to be one associated with this event — but we are keeping our eyes on it," the geophysicist Robert Sanders told NBC News.

Australia issued, then canceled, a tsunami watch for western coasts.

Mingming Evora, country director for Indonesia for charity Plan International, told NBC News: The latest report is that the tsunami waning has been lifted in the main areas, where people are safe and already going back to their homes.

"There has been no major damage reported. In fact, the only problem so far was traffic jams because people rushed to the center of the islands in their cars, but it is getting back to normal now."
"People are just so relieved, and so are we."

A 7.9 to 8.1 magnitude quake would "easily" be the strongest so far this year and the strongest worldwide since Chile in September 2015, according to NBC News meteorologist William Karins.
Erwin, a resident of Mentawai, a chain of islands off Sumatra, told Metro TV: "I am at the beach currently looking to see any tsunami sign with my flashlight. There's nothing. A few minutes have passed but nothing, but many people have already evacuated to higher places."

Indonesia straddles the so-called "Pacific Ring of Fire," a highly seismically active zone that was badly hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. 

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