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Earthquakes are common on the West Coast, with multiple plate boundaries like the San Andreas fault making geologic activity more likely. They are rarer on the East Coast, but they do happen .
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 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 ...
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was triggered by a megathrust earthquake along the convergent boundary of the Indian plate and Burma microplate and killed over 200,000 people. The 2011 tsunami off the coast of Japan , which caused 16,000 deaths and did US$360 billion in damage, was caused by a magnitude 9 megathrust earthquake ...
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.
Movement of tectonic plates against each other sends seismic waves rippling across earth’s surface
Outer rise earthquakes on the lower plate occur when normal faults oceanward of the subduction zone are activated by flexure of the plate as it bends into the subduction zone. [73] The 2009 Samoa earthquake is an example of this type of event. Displacement of the sea floor caused by this event generated a six-meter tsunami in nearby Samoa.
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 ...