Earthquakes
There are thousands of earthquakes across the Earth each day. Most are too small to be detected without monitoring equipment, but some are powerful enough to destroy a city. Sendai, Los Angles, Kobe, Christchurch and Bam are the names of some of the places that have been affected by powerful earthquakes in recent years.
Earthquakes are most common at plate boundaries. The relative motion of two plates releases energy into the crust and causes faults to form and move. When two plates or a fault lock up, with little or no movement over a long time period, the result is a large earthquake when they eventually unlock and quickly release a large amount of energy.
Learn more with the BBC News animated earthquake guide.
Image: The San Andreas fault, California (Peter Menzel/SPL)
Introduction
Earthquakes
TV clips (12)
play
The Boxing Day earthquake
Experts find shocking underwater evidence of the huge quake that caused the 2004 tsunami.
A team of experts searches for evidence of the huge underwater earthquake that generated destructive tsunami waves on Boxing Day 2004. They find a series of massive fractures at the bottom of the Indian Ocean that displaced large volumes of water and sent the tsunami waves on their way towards land.
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What causes earthquakes?
Iain Stewart explains what causes quakes and how we measure their magnitude.
Professor Iain Stewart explains how the Earth's tectonic plates cause earthquakes. He explains that we measure the magnitude of quakes using a scale that is sometimes called the Richter Scale.
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The deadliest quake
The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake in China killed nearly one million people.
Professor Iain Stewart tells the story of the 23 January 1556 Shaanxi earthquake in central China, which is estimated to have killed nearly one million people. Modern estimates put the magnitude of this quake at 8.0.
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2010 Haiti earthquake
Newsnight reports on the deadly quake that took thousands of lives.
Newsnight reports on the powerful 2010 Haiti earthquake that killed thousands of people and levelled houses and other buildings.
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Predicting earthquakes in Turkey
Scientists predict a deadly quake on the treacherous North Anatolian fault.
Scientists developed a computer model that predicted the deadly August 1999 Izmit earthquake in northern Turkey. The 7.4 magnitude quake occurred along the North Anatolian fault and killed 25,000 people.
Earthquakes
An earthquake (also known as a quake, tremor or temblor) is the result of a sudden release of energy in the Earth's crust that creates seismic waves. The seismicity, seismism or seismic activity of an area refers to the frequency, type and size of earthquakes experienced over a period of time.
Earthquakes are measured using observations from seismometers. The moment magnitude is the most common scale on which earthquakes larger than approximately 5 are reported for the entire globe. The more numerous earthquakes smaller than magnitude 5 reported by national seismological observatories are measured mostly on the local magnitude scale, also referred to as the Richter scale. These two scales are numerically similar over their range of validity. Magnitude 3 or lower earthquakes are mostly almost imperceptible or weak and magnitude 7 and over potentially cause serious damage over larger areas, depending on their depth. The largest earthquakes in historic times have been of magnitude slightly over 9, although there is no limit to the possible magnitude. The most recent large earthquake of magnitude 9.0 or larger was a 9.0 magnitude earthquake in Japan in 2011 (as of October 2012), and it was the largest Japanese earthquake since records began. Intensity of shaking is measured on the modified Mercalli scale. The shallower an earthquake, the more damage to structures it causes, all else being equal.
At the Earth's surface, earthquakes manifest themselves by shaking and sometimes displacement of the ground. When the epicenter of a large earthquake is located offshore, the seabed may be displaced sufficiently to cause a tsunami. Earthquakes can also trigger landslides, and occasionally volcanic activity.
In its most general sense, the word earthquake is used to describe any seismic event — whether natural or caused by humans — that generates seismic waves. Earthquakes are caused mostly by rupture of geological faults, but also by other events such as volcanic activity, landslides, mine blasts, and nuclear tests. An earthquake's point of initial rupture is called its focus or hypocenter. The epicenter is the point at ground level directly above the hypocenter.
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