One of the largest quakes ever to strike land rather than sea — in fact the largest ever recorded from a continental collision. It shook the eastern Himalaya so hard it dammed and rerouted whole rivers, and was felt so far off that people argued over whose earthquake it even was — Indians sure it was theirs, though its heart lay across the border in Tibet.
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DownloadThe 1950 Assam-Tibet earthquake struck on August 15, 1950, registering magnitude 8.6 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 7,943× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 28.36°N, 96.44°E, at a depth of about 15 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 1,530 people were killed.