The largest earthquake ever recorded. The ground shook for roughly ten minutes, and the sea it shoved was still killing people in Japan a day later — seventeen thousand kilometres away.
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DownloadThe 1960 Valdivia earthquake struck on May 22, 1960, registering magnitude 9.5 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 177,828× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 38.14°S, 73.41°W, at a depth of about 25 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 2,226 people were killed.