The devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria a week ago, leaving dozens dead and injured, raised questions about where earthquakes occur in the world?
What are the strongest earthquakes that occurred in the last century?
Which is the most harmful to humans?
In terms of human and material losses.
Earthquakes often occur at the edges of the continents and their convergence with some bodies of water, for example, the confluence of the Pacific Ocean with East Asia or the West of the Americas. Likewise, whenever we enter the middle of the land in the continents, the probability of earthquakes decreases, as we notice here in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas.
This is related to a term we hear a lot these days, which is the tectonic plates, which are simply the upper crust of the earth, and there are 7 main plates in the globe, the largest of which is the Pacific plate, then North America, then Eurasia, and earthquakes occur at the meeting points of these plates.
The largest earthquakes that occurred during the past century were the Chilean earthquake in 1960, which reached approximately 9.5 degrees on the Richter scale, then the Alaska earthquake in 1964 with a magnitude of 9.2 degrees, the Sumatra earthquake in Indonesia in 2004, and the Tohoku earthquake in Japan in 2011, whose strength also exceeded 9 degrees.
But the largest earthquake does not mean that it is the most harmful, as this is related to the population density at the site of the earthquake. The Tangshan earthquake in China, with an estimated number of victims of 300,000, was the most harmful to humans, and the second in China was also the Haiyuan earthquake, with a similar number of victims, then the Sumatra earthquake, with more than 200,000 dead. .
The most costly earthquakes in the world were in Japan, where the losses of the Tohoku earthquake in 2011 were estimated at 360 billion dollars, followed by the Great Hanshin in 1995, with losses estimated at 200 billion dollars.