It struck northern Iran just after midnight, collapsing homes of unreinforced brick and adobe onto people as they slept. Forty thousand died in minutes.
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DownloadThe 1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake struck on June 20, 1990, registering magnitude 7.4 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 126× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 36.96°N, 49.41°E, at a depth of about 19 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 40,000 people were killed.