A major Chilean quake that arrived with something rare: minutes of official warning on a coast drilled for exactly this. A million people moved before the water came.
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DownloadThe 2015 Illapel earthquake struck on September 16, 2015, registering magnitude 8.3 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 2,818× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 31.57°S, 71.67°W, at a depth of about 22 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 15 people were killed.