The deadliest earthquake in Chilean history, striking near midnight. Its toll pushed Chile to found the national agency that would rebuild and re-engineer the country against the next one.
Rumble is a beautifully dark, free earthquake tracker for iPhone — live USGS data and quiet alerts when it matters near you.
DownloadThe 1939 Chillan earthquake struck on January 25, 1939, registering magnitude 7.8 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 596× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 36.30°S, 72.21°W, at a depth of about 35 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 30,000 people were killed.