The shaking shook loose a face of Peru's highest peak, and the rock and ice avalanched down at hundreds of kilometres an hour to bury the town of Yungay whole. Those who ran uphill to the cemetery lived.
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DownloadThe 1970 Ancash earthquake struck on May 31, 1970, registering magnitude 7.9 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 708× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 9.27°S, 78.85°W, at a depth of about 58 km — a shallow crustal earthquake. Shallow earthquakes like this release their energy close to the surface, which is why the shaking near the epicenter was so violent.
An estimated 66,794 people were killed.