The archipelago, or string of islands, that makes up Indonesia is located on the so-called “Ring of Fire,” an arrangement of fault lines and volcanoes that surrounds the Pacific Basin. Before December 2004, the fault that triggered the massive earthquake (magnitude 9.1) had ...read more
On the day after Christmas in 2004, a massive undersea earthquake occurs just off the coast of Indonesia at a few minutes before 8 a.m. local time. With a magnitude of 9.3, the quake was the most powerful of the last 40 years and the second largest earthquake in recorded ...read more
One of the first tsunamis ever to be recorded devastates the east coast of Kyushu, the southernmost major island of Japan, on this day in 1596. The tsunami was set off by a relatively small earthquake in Beppu Bay on Kyushu’s east coast. Despite its weakness, the quake, which was ...read more
As daylight breaks, survivors of a tsunami in Japan find that more than 20,000 of their friends and family have perished overnight. The tsunami resulted from a disturbance in the Japan Trench, 120 miles east of Japan’s main island of Honshu. This deep underwater gorge is ...read more
On this day in the year 365, a powerful earthquake off the coast of Greece causes a tsunami that devastates the city of Alexandria, Egypt. Although there were no measuring tools at the time, scientists now estimate that the quake was actually two tremors in succession, the ...read more
A tsunami caused by an earthquake off the coast of Chile travels across the Pacific Ocean and kills 61 people in Hilo, Hawaii, on this day in 1960. The massive 8.5-magnitude quake had killed thousands in Chile the previous day. The earthquake, involving a severe plate shift, ...read more
A powerful earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, on this day in 2004 sets off a tsunami that wreaks death and devastation across the Indian Ocean coastline. The quake was the second strongest ever recorded and the estimated 230,000 dead made this disaster one of the 10 ...read more