Page 55 - (DK) Danger! Open with Extreme Caution!

… and the strongest

The world’s strongest recorded earthquake
struck Chile in 1960. Measuring 9.5 on
the Richter scale, it triggered a 36-ft-
(11-m-) high tsunami that swept entire
villages up to 1.9 miles (3 km) inland.
The surface shock waves were so powerful
that they could still be felt two days later.
More than 1,650 people were killed

The deadliest… and another two million lost their homes.
In 1976, the water in a well outside
Tangshan, China, rose and fell three
times in one day. At 4 A.M. the next
morning, the deadliest earthquake in
modern times struck the city—most
people were still asleep in their beds
and had no chance of escape.
Measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale,
the quake flattened hundreds of
thousands of buildings and killed
up to 750,000 people.

The size of an earthquake can be measured
Richter scale
using the Richter scale. Starting from 1, which
is the weakest point on the scale, it measures
the amount of movement in the ground during
a quake, with each point on the scale being
10 times stronger than the one before. At
the moment, the biggest earthquake measured
9.5, but there’s no limit to how massive future

earthquakes could be.

EARTHQUAKES 55
(c) 2011 Dorling Kindersley. All Rights Reserved.