Question: What causes an earthquake to happen? If an earthquake was a 10 which is the highest would most of a countries population die? ( not countries like india and china )

James Verdon answered on 26 Jun 2012:

Hi hamdi,
The largest earthquake ever recorded was in Chile in 1960. That had a magnitude of 9.5. However, that only killed about 5000 people. Compare that with the Haiti earthquake, which was only magnitude 7, yet killed about 300,000 people. There’s much more to the fatality rate in an earthquake than the earthquake magnitude.

For instance, you need to look at whether the earthquake occurs near to major population cities. You have to look at the conditions in these cities. For instance, lots of people died in Haiti because lots of people were crammed into poor quality buildings which collapsed on top of them. Compare that with Japan, where large buildings are designed to withstand earthquakes, so despite the fact that Japan gets lots of large earthquakes, often not many people are killed. Stealing from one of Davie’s answers to a different question, the most deadly earthquake occurred in China in the 16th Century, killing about 830,000 people.