A rupture that tore two hundred kilometres along the Motagua Fault, the seam between two plates. It struck before dawn and left roughly a million people homeless.
Rumble is a beautifully dark, free earthquake tracker for iPhone — live USGS data and quiet alerts when it matters near you.
DownloadThe 1976 Guatemala earthquake struck on February 4, 1976, registering magnitude 7.5 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 178× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 15.32°N, 89.10°W, at a depth of about 5 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 23,000 people were killed.