Largest Earthquakes in History
The strongest and most destructive earthquakes in human history — from the record-setting 1960 Valdivia event to catastrophes that reshaped entire countries. Each event has an epicentre map, estimated sensitivity zones and data from the USGS and GEM-GHEC catalogues.
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19.5mw
Great Chilean Earthquake (Valdivia)
The most powerful earthquake ever recorded instrumentally. The rupture stretched nearly 1,000 km along the Chilean subduction zone. A tsunami up to 25 m high devastated the Chilean coast and crossed the entire Pacific, killing people in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.
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29.2mw
Great Alaska Earthquake
The strongest earthquake in North American history and the second strongest ever recorded. Shaking in Anchorage lasted about 4.5 minutes. Most victims were killed not by the shaking but by tsunamis that struck the coasts of Alaska, Oregon and California.
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39.1mww
Great Tōhoku Earthquake
The strongest earthquake in Japanese history. A tsunami up to 40 m high travelled as far as 10 km inland, washing away entire towns and causing the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident — the worst since Chernobyl. Honshu, Japan's main island, shifted 2.4 m to the east.
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49.1mw
2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake
An undersea earthquake off Sumatra triggered the deadliest tsunami in human history. Waves up to 30 m high struck the coasts of 14 countries — from Indonesia and Thailand to Sri Lanka and Somalia. The catastrophe led to the creation of the Indian Ocean tsunami warning system.
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59.0mw
1952 Kamchatka Earthquake
The strongest earthquake in Russian history. The resulting tsunami, up to 18 m high, almost completely destroyed the town of Severo-Kurilsk on Paramushir Island. The tragedy was long suppressed in the USSR; it prompted the creation of the country's tsunami warning service.
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68.8mww
2025 Kamchatka Earthquake
The strongest earthquake of the 21st century after Tōhoku 2011 and one of the most powerful ever recorded. It struck the same subduction zone as the 1952 catastrophe. Tsunami waves swept across the entire Pacific, but timely evacuations prevented any fatalities.
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78.8mww
2010 Chile Earthquake (Maule)
A rupture about 500 km long in the same subduction zone as Valdivia 1960. Strong shaking was felt across an area home to 80% of Chile's population, and the tsunami destroyed coastal villages. The quake was powerful enough to slightly shift Earth's axis and shorten the day.
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88.8mw
1906 Ecuador–Colombia Earthquake
A massive earthquake off the Pacific coast of Ecuador and Colombia that generated a destructive tsunami. The waves reached as far as San Francisco and Japan. The same fault segment later re-ruptured in parts in 1942, 1958 and 1979.
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98.7mw
1965 Rat Islands Earthquake
One of the ten strongest earthquakes on record struck the uninhabited Rat Islands of the Aleutian arc. A tsunami up to 10 m high hit Shemya Island, but the region's remoteness meant no casualties and little damage.
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108.6mww
2005 Nias–Simeulue Earthquake
It struck just three months after the 2004 catastrophe on the adjacent segment of the same Sunda subduction zone — a striking example of stress transfer between megathrust segments. The Indonesian islands of Nias and Simeulue bore the brunt of the destruction.
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118.6mw
1950 Assam–Tibet Earthquake
The strongest continental earthquake ever recorded — it occurred not under the ocean but in the Himalayan collision zone of the Indian and Eurasian plates. Enormous landslides dammed rivers, and the later failure of those dams caused catastrophic floods.
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128.5Mw
Great Lisbon Earthquake
On the morning of 1 November 1755, All Saints' Day, an earthquake, tsunami and subsequent fires almost completely destroyed Lisbon — one of Europe's wealthiest capitals. The catastrophe shook Enlightenment thought and gave birth to scientific seismology.
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138.3Ms
1889 Chilik Earthquake
One of the strongest intracontinental earthquakes in history struck the Chilik river valley east of Verny (now Almaty). The shaking was felt across a vast area — from Western Siberia to Kashgar. Verny, still rebuilding after the 1887 disaster, was badly damaged again.
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148.3Ms
1556 Shaanxi Earthquake
The deadliest earthquake in human history. Chinese annals record about 830,000 deaths: millions of Loess Plateau inhabitants lived in yaodongs — cave dwellings dug into soft loess — which collapsed with the very first shocks.
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158.0mw
1911 Kemin (Kebin) Earthquake
The third in the series of catastrophic earthquakes that struck the Verny (Almaty) region at the turn of the century, and the most destructive of them for the city. Surface ruptures about 200 km long formed in the Trans-Ili and Kungey Alatau mountains, and giant landslides dammed mountain valleys.
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168.0mw
1985 Mexico City Earthquake
The rupture lay off the Pacific coast, 350 km from Mexico City, but the soft lakebed soils beneath the capital amplified the shaking dozens of times, collapsing hundreds of multi-storey buildings. The disaster became the classic case of soil resonance and changed building codes worldwide.
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178.0mw
Great Kantō Earthquake
The catastrophe that destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama on 1 September 1923. The shock struck at lunchtime while cooking fires burned — firestorms in the wooden cityscape claimed more lives than the shaking itself. In Japan, 1 September is still observed as Disaster Prevention Day.
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187.9mwc
2008 Sichuan Earthquake
A catastrophe in China's Sichuan province: the Longmenshan fault ruptured for 240 km along the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Thousands of schools collapsed and millions were left homeless. Landslides created dozens of "quake lakes" that threatened to burst downstream.
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197.9mw
1906 San Francisco Earthquake
A 477 km rupture of the San Andreas Fault wrecked San Francisco; the fires that followed raged for four days and destroyed 80% of the city. The study of this event produced the elastic rebound theory — the foundation of modern seismology.
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207.8mww
2023 Turkey–Syria Earthquakes
A double blow: the M7.8 shock near Gaziantep was followed nine hours later by an M7.5 event. Turkey's worst disaster in modern history — entire districts across a dozen provinces collapsed, affecting millions of people on both sides of the Turkish–Syrian border.
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217.8mww
2015 Nepal (Gorkha) Earthquake
Nepal's worst disaster in 80 years. Hundreds of thousands of homes were destroyed, along with part of the UNESCO-listed monuments of the Kathmandu Valley. The quake-triggered avalanche on Everest made it the deadliest day in the mountain's history.
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227.6mwc
2005 Kashmir Earthquake
A devastating earthquake in Pakistani Kashmir that all but flattened the city of Muzaffarabad. Thousands of schools collapsed during lessons. Landslides cut entire valleys off from aid, and the approaching Himalayan winter left millions homeless in brutal conditions.
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237.5mw
Tangshan Earthquake
The deadliest earthquake of the 20th century. The night-time shock struck directly beneath Tangshan, an industrial city of a million people with no seismic-resistant construction — the city was levelled within a minute. The official death toll is 242,000; independent estimates reach 655,000.
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247.3Ms
1887 Verny Earthquake
In the early morning of 9 June 1887, the city of Verny — the future Almaty — was almost completely destroyed: only a handful of its 1,800 brick buildings survived. Afterwards the city was rebuilt mostly in timber, which saved many lives in the earthquakes that followed.
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257.2mw
1948 Ashgabat Earthquake
A night-time earthquake almost completely destroyed the capital of Soviet Turkmenistan. By various estimates up to two-thirds of Ashgabat's population perished. The scale of the disaster was kept secret in the USSR for decades, leaving it one of the least-known great tragedies of the 20th century.
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267.1mw
1908 Messina Earthquake
The deadliest earthquake in European history. In the early morning of 28 December, the shaking and a 12-metre tsunami destroyed Messina in Sicily and Reggio Calabria on the mainland. Messina lost nearly half of its inhabitants.
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277.0mwc
2010 Haiti Earthquake
An example of how a moderate-magnitude event becomes a mega-catastrophe: a shallow rupture 25 km from overcrowded Port-au-Prince and extremely fragile construction produced a horrific death toll. Hundreds of thousands of buildings were destroyed, including the presidential palace and the cathedral.
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286.9mw
1995 Kobe (Great Hanshin) Earthquake
The shock struck directly beneath the major port city of Kobe. Elevated expressways thought to be earthquake-proof toppled over, and tens of thousands of older wooden houses burned. At roughly $100 billion in damage, it ranks among the costliest natural disasters ever.
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296.8ms
Spitak (Armenia) Earthquake
The catastrophe that devastated northern Armenia on 7 December 1988: the town of Spitak was completely destroyed, and Leninakan (Gyumri) and Kirovakan (Vanadzor) were severely damaged. The mass collapse of Soviet-era panel buildings forced a rethink of seismic building codes across the USSR.
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306.6mwc
2003 Bam Earthquake
A pre-dawn shock destroyed the ancient Iranian city of Bam, including Arg-e Bam — the world's largest adobe citadel, over 2,000 years old. Traditional mud-brick buildings collapsed wholesale, burying residents as they slept.