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2004 Indian Ocean earthquake: The epicenter is off the northwestern coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. 9.2 This is the third largest earthquake in recorded history and generated massive tsunamis, which caused widespread devastation when they hit land, leaving an estimated 230,000 people dead in countries around the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean.
Earthquakes occur when two plates suddenly slip past each other, setting off seismic waves that cause the planet's surface to shake, according to the USGS. What is an earthquake, scientifically ...
The people who recorded the incident in Japan couldn’t have known that the ground had shaken an ocean away, in the present-day United States. Today, the Cascadia Subduction Zone remains eerily ...
The magnitude of an earthquake isn't enough to determine how much death and destruction it will cause. Location, time of day, building codes and other factors make a big difference.
Prior to the 1980s, scientists thought that the subduction zone did not generate earthquakes like other subduction zones around the world, but research by Brian Atwater and Kenji Satake tied together evidence of a large tsunami on the Washington coast with documentation of an orphan tsunami in Japan (a tsunami without an associated earthquake ...
The earthquakes are caused by slip along the thrust fault that forms the contact between the two plates. These interplate earthquakes are the planet's most powerful, with moment magnitudes (M w) that can exceed 9.0. [1] [2] Since 1900, all earthquakes of magnitude 9.0 or greater have been megathrust earthquakes. [3]
Movement of tectonic plates against each other sends seismic waves rippling across earth’s surface
Earthquakes that caused the greatest loss of life, while powerful, were deadly because of their proximity to either heavily populated areas or the ocean, where earthquakes often create tsunamis that can devastate communities thousands of kilometers away. Regions most at risk for great loss of life include those where earthquakes are relatively ...