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Great Earthquakes
9 entries
The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake
The All Saints' Day earthquake, tsunami and fire that destroyed Lisbon and helped found modern seismology
The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake
The San Andreas rupture and three-day fire that destroyed most of San Francisco and gave science the elastic-rebound theory
The 1960 Valdivia Earthquake
The most powerful earthquake ever recorded, a magnitude 9.5 megathrust rupture in southern Chile with a Pacific-wide tsunami
The 1976 Tangshan Earthquake
The predawn earthquake that leveled an industrial city east of Beijing, with an official toll of 242,419 and far higher outside estimates
The 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami
The magnitude 9.1 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake and the deadliest tsunami in recorded history, which killed about 228,000 people in 14 countries
The 2010 Haiti Earthquake
The magnitude 7.0 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, with one of the most disputed death tolls of any modern disaster
The 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami
Japan's strongest recorded earthquake, whose tsunami killed nearly 16,000 people and caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident
The 2023 Turkey–Syria Earthquakes
Twin magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 shocks on the East Anatolian Fault that killed nearly 60,000 people in southern Turkey and northern Syria
The 2026 Venezuela Earthquakes
Twin magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 shocks on June 24, 2026, that struck La Guaira and Caracas, the strongest in Venezuela since 1900