It toppled elevated expressways that engineers had believed earthquake-proof, and forced Japan to rewrite its building codes from the ground up.
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DownloadThe 1995 Kobe earthquake struck on January 16, 1995, registering magnitude 6.9 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 22× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 34.58°N, 135.02°E, 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 6,434 people were killed.