Explore documented earthquakes by place and understand each event.

USGS earthquake records with magnitude, depth, time, mapped location and precomputed links to nearby and similar events.

ScaleMagnitude and depthSeparate measurements with different meanings

PlaceMapped coordinatesPublished epicentre, not a damage boundary

ContextNearby and similar eventsPrecomputed from the same governed corpus

Large earthquakes across time

These are selected strong events in the stored catalogue. Their spacing does not show how often earthquakes occur.

Magnitude is logarithmic; a one-unit difference is not a one-unit change in energy. Magnitude types can differ between historic records. USGS earthquake catalogue · 2026-09-02T13:32:41.930Z. This is historical context, not a warning.

Event dates and magnitudes

Selected large earthquake records
Event	Date	Magnitude
1960 Great Chilean Earthquake (Valdivia Earthquake)	1960-05-22	9.5
The 1964 Prince William Sound, Alaska Earthquake	1964-03-28	9.2
2004 Sumatra - Andaman Islands Earthquake	2004-12-26	9.1
2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake, Japan	2011-03-11	9.1
89 km ESE of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Russia	1952-11-04	9
1906 Ecuador-Colombia Earthquake	1906-01-31	8.8
2010 Maule, Chile Earthquake	2010-02-27	8.8
2025 Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia Earthquake	2025-07-29	8.8
1965 Western Aleutian Islands (Hawadax/Rat Islands) Earthquake	1965-02-04	8.7
The 1946 Unimak Island, Alaska Earthquake	1946-04-01	8.6
1950 Assam-Tibet Earthquake	1950-08-15	8.6
1957 Atka, Alaska Earthquake	1957-03-09	8.6
78 km WSW of Singkil, Indonesia	2005-03-28	8.6
2012 Wharton Basin Earthquake	2012-04-11	8.6
94 km ENE of Vallenar, Chile	1922-11-11	8.5
1938 Banda Sea Earthquake	1938-02-01	8.5
1963 Kuril Islands Earthquake	1963-10-13	8.5
1923 Kamchatka, Russia Earthquake	1923-02-03	8.4