• Question: Where did the deadliest earthquake take place?

    Asked by milachinchilla to Davie, James V on 26 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by kcsully98.
    • Photo: Davie Galloway

      Davie Galloway answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      hi milachinchilla … (am loving these usernames btw)

      deadliest earthquake occurred in Shaanxi, China on 23 January 1556 with a magnitude of 8 and resulted in the deaths of around 830,000 people … more recently (2nd deadliest) occurred in Haiti on 12 January 2101 (magnitude 7) and killed over 316,000 people

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Hi milachinchilla,
      The largest earthquake ever happened in Chile in 1960. It had a magnitude 9.5 on the Richter scale. However, it only killed about 5000 people. There are a number of factors that affect how many people an earthquake kills. For example, how close it is to populated areas: if an earthquake hits an area where not many people live, it won’t kill many people.

      The quality of buildings where an earthquake hits is also important. For example, Japan has excellent building regulations – all the buildings are designed to withstand quakes. So Japan gets lots of earthquakes, but not so many people are killed. In contrast, the Haiti earthquake in 2010 wasn’t that big (only a magnitude 7), but 300,000 people were killed. Haiti is very poor, so most of the buildings were not well constructed, so they all collapsed and killed people.

      Another factor is what secondary effects, like tsunamis or landslides, that the earthquakes trigger. For example, in the recent Tohoku Japan earthquake and tsunami, the majority of the 15,000 people killed were killed by the tsunami, not the earthquake.

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