It struck a two-thousand-year-old citadel city of mud brick before dawn. The ancient construction that made Bam beautiful is what made it fall.
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DownloadThe 2003 Bam earthquake struck on December 26, 2003, registering magnitude 6.8 (estimated magnitude). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 16× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 22.27°S, 169.31°E, at a depth of about 10 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 31,000 people were killed.