No fault long enough to generate a magnitude 10 earthquake is known to exist, and if it did, it would extend around most of the planet. The largest earthquake ever recorded was a magnitude 9.5 on May 22, 1960 in Chile on a fault that is almost 1,000 miles long… a “megaquake” in its own right.
A sudden breaking in the rocks along a roughly 560–620-mile (900–1,000-km) stretch of the Nazca Plate caused the earthquake, which has been generally agreed to have had a magnitude of 9.5—the largest earthquake recorded in the 20th century.
Its over 1,700-foot wave was the largest ever recorded for a tsunami. It inundated five square miles of land and cleared hundreds of thousands of trees. Remarkably, only two fatalities occurred.
The effects of these earthquakes include strong ground shaking that goes on for several minutes, subsidence and/or uplift of coastal areas, liquefaction, and tsunami. Aftershocks will be both strong and numerous (possibly M7 or higher).
According to the USGS, earthquakes of magnitude 10 or larger cannot happen. The largest earthquake ever recorded was a magnitude 9.5. It occurred in 1960 near Valdivia, Chile, where the Nazca plate subducts under the South American plate.
A 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck central Myanmar on March 28, 2025. The death toll has surpassed 3,600 people, and 5,000 are injured. The epicenter was located approximately 9.9 miles outside of Sagaing, Myanmar, at a depth of six miles.
The biggest earthquake ever recorded, of magnitude 9.5, happened in 1960 in Chile, at a subduction zone where the Pacific plate dives under the South American plate.
Earthquakes may last seconds to minutes. While the shaking of small earthquakes typically lasts only a few seconds, strong shaking during moderate to large earthquakes, such as the 2004 Sumatra earthquake, can lasts couple minutes. 4. What are foreshocks and aftershocks?
On average, several hundred earthquakes are detected by the British Geological Survey each year, but almost all are far too faint to be felt by humans. Those that are felt generally cause very little damage.
1. Biobío, Chile. A 9.5 magnitude earthquake struck in a central region of Chile in 1960. Known as the Valdivia or Great Chilean earthquake, the largest ever recorded temblor resulted in more than 1,600 deaths in Chile and beyond, most of them caused by a large tsunami.
Because of various shortcomings of the original ML scale, most seismological authorities now use other similar scales such as the moment magnitude scale (Mw ) to report earthquake magnitudes, but much of the news media still erroneously refers to these as "Richter" magnitudes.
The world's greatest earthquake belt, the circum-Pacific seismic belt, is found along the rim of the Pacific Ocean, where about 81 percent of our planet's largest earthquakes occur. It has earned the nickname "Ring of Fire".
The Richter scale is a base-10 logarithmic scale, meaning that each order of magnitude is 10 times more intensive than the last one. In other words, a two is 10 times more intense than a one and a three is 100 times greater.
Since 1900, the earthquake in Tangshan in China in 1976 caused the highest number of deaths, reaching over 240,000. However, some estimate the number to be over 650,000 fatalities.
A large earthquake far away will feel like a gentle bump followed several seconds later by stronger rolling shaking that may feel like sharp shaking for a little while. A small earthquake nearby will feel like a small sharp jolt followed by a few stronger sharp shakes that pass quickly.
The deadliest recorded tsunami in history claimed hundreds of thousands of lives after a magnitude 9.1 earthquake rocked the Indian Ocean in 2004. While not as strong, the magnitude 8.8 earthquake off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula on July 29 brought tsunami waves to Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States.
No, California is not going to fall into the ocean. California is firmly planted on the top of the earth's crust in a location where it spans two tectonic plates.
The wave had a run-up height of 50 metres (164 ft) near the landslide and 28 metres (92 ft) at Qullissat, the site of an abandoned settlement across the strait on Disko Island, 20 kilometres (11 nmi; 12 mi) away, where it inundated the coast as far as 100 metres (328 ft) inland.
Most studies have placed it at 9.4–9.6 on the moment magnitude scale, making it the strongest earthquake ever recorded, while some studies have placed the magnitude lower than 9.4. It occurred in the afternoon (19:11:14 GMT, 15:11:14 local time), and lasted 10 minutes.
