A great offshore rupture where the Nazca plate dives beneath South America. Its tsunami carried clear across the Pacific to Japan and Hawaii.
Rumble is a beautifully dark, free earthquake tracker for iPhone — live USGS data and quiet alerts when it matters near you.
DownloadThe 1906 Ecuador–Colombia earthquake struck on January 31, 1906, registering magnitude 8.8 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 15,849× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 0.95°N, 79.37°W, at a depth of about 20 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 1,000 people were killed.