A sharp jolt directly beneath Alaska's largest city. Decades of strict seismic codes meant a quake that would have levelled other cities killed no one.
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DownloadThe 2018 Anchorage earthquake struck on November 30, 2018, registering magnitude 7.1 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 45× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 61.35°N, 149.96°W, at a depth of about 47 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.