It tore through more than twenty separate faults in one go, jumping between them in ways textbooks said it shouldn't, and heaved the seabed as much as six metres into the air.
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DownloadThe 2016 Kaikoura earthquake struck on November 13, 2016, 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 501× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 42.74°S, 173.05°E, at a depth of about 15 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 2 people were killed.