It destroyed a swath of Soviet Armenia and killed twenty-five thousand. The scale was such that Gorbachev cut short a visit to Washington, and the USSR did the near-unthinkable — it asked the West for help.
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DownloadThe 1988 Spitak earthquake struck on December 7, 1988, registering magnitude 6.8 (surface-wave magnitude). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 16× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 40.99°N, 44.19°E, 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 25,000 people were killed.