Although the extent of the damage is still unclear, photographs showed debris strewn across the roads and cracks opening up in the roads.
The quake struck at a depth of 90 kilometers (about 56 miles) near Kainantu, a town with a population of about 8,500, the US Geological Survey said.
There have been no reports of deaths or official confirmation of damage, but residents took to social media to post photos of cracked roads, damaged cars and items falling from supermarket shelves, Reuters reported.
The US National Tsunami Warning Center said there was no threat of tsunami waves. Earlier in the day, it had said dangerous tsunami waves were possible 1,000 kilometers (roughly 621 miles) along the coasts of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
A similar-sized earthquake that struck the country’s remote highlands in 2018 killed more than 60 people and injured 500, destroying homes, triggering landslides and damaging a major gas plant. Papua New Guinea is vulnerable to earthquakes because it lies along the “Ring of Fire” in the Pacific Ocean, where shifting tectonic plates push against each other, causing tremors.
The “ring” extends along a 25,000-mile (40,000-kilometer) arc from the Pacific plate boundary, to smaller plates such as the Philippine Sea plate, to the Cocos plates and Nazca bordering the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
It is home to the most active volcanoes in the world.
People most at risk of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes live in countries along the Ring of Fire, such as Chile, Japan, the West Coast of the US, and other island nations such as the Solomon Islands, up to the western coast of North and South America.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story quoted the Australian Red Cross as saying at least 16 people had been killed. The Red Cross has confirmed that the death toll is incorrect and is linked to a statement about an earlier earthquake in Papua New Guinea that was circulated in error.