It ruptured thirteen hundred kilometres of fault in under ten minutes. The tsunami it raised crossed the entire Indian Ocean and took some two hundred thousand lives across fifteen countries.
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DownloadThe 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake struck on December 26, 2004, registering magnitude 9.1 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 44,668× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 3.29°N, 95.98°E, at a depth of about 30 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 227,899 people were killed.