Earthquakes can rock your world – literally. At least a million earthquakes occur worldwide every year. Most of them are so small only very sensitive instruments can detect them. About 12,000 to 14,000 earthquakes each year are big enough for people to feel.
Even most of those don’t cause real damage. But the biggest earthquakes are incredibly powerful. They can cause entire buildings to shake into pieces, trigger tsunamis and landslides, and shift the land surface.
Moment magnitude scale
Clearly, earthquakes come in all sizes. To describe their intensity, seismologists—scientists who study earthquakes—use a special scale called the moment magnitude scale. The scale goes from Magnitude 1 (M1) to Magnitude 10 (M10). The scale is logarithmic. That means that each number represents an increase of 10 in intensity. On this scale, an M5 earthquake is 10 times as strong as an M4 earthquake. An M6 earthquake is 10 times stronger than an M5 and 100 times stronger than an M4.
Plate tectonics and earthquakes
Most earthquakes aren’t just random. They typically occur where pieces of Earth’s crust—the planet’s thin, brittle outer layer—shift along fractures called faults. The crust, along with the very top of the upper mantle just below, is broken into about twelve or so pieces called tectonic plates.
Strike-Slip Fault
Those plates slowly move, shifting in relation to each other. Typically, plate motion isn’t smooth. It catches and builds up tension. Then, it suddenly slips. That slip causes earthquakes.
Two tectonic plates sliding past each other creates a strike-slip fault. The San Andreas fault in California is an example of a strike-slip fault.
Thrust Fault
Head on collisions between plates also cause earthquakes. That’s happening in India and Nepal, where two plates slowly smash into each other. The collision has pushed pieces of the crust up like a rug wrinkling, creating the towering Himalaya mountains and triggering many earthquakes in the region.
Other plate collisions form thrust faults, where two pieces of crust overlap like tiles being pushed together. The biggest thrusts are subduction zones. In subduction zones, oceanic plates dive under lighter continental plates.
Normal Fault
When two parts of the crust pull apart, a rift or trench, such as the Great African Rift, forms between the parts. The faults on either side of such a rift are called normal faults. Earthquakes can occur as the sides get pulled further apart.
Great Earthquakes
It’s no surprise that nearly all of Earth’s very biggest earthquakes occur along active plate-boundary faults. In fact, a worldwide map showing where earthquakes are most common also outlines the edges of many of Earth’s tectonic plates. These types of earthquakes originate very deep in the crust, from 16 to as much as 400 miles below the surface.
Plate motion also causes faults and earthquakes in the middle of plates. Imagine a car crash. The whole car can crack and bend, not just the bumper that got hit. Like the car, the crust may stretch, slide and shift in response to plate motion.
Each year, about big 16 earthquakes over Magnitude 7 shake the planet. Earthquakes over M8 are called “Great earthquakes.” On average, these occur only about once every 1.5 years. The strongest earthquake ever recorded was a Magnitude 9.5 that occurred in Chile in May,1960.
Great earthquakes can rattle the entire planet like a bell ringing. That happened in 2011, with a huge earthquake near Fukushima, Japan. The force of the quake moved Japan’s main island eight feet closer to the US. The movement was so big it changed the weight distribution on the planet. This caused the Earth spin faster on its axis, making each Earth day 1.8 microseconds shorter.
Written by Laura McCamy
Edited by Beth Geiger, MS Geology
Illustrated by Renee Barthelemy