The 10 Largest Earthquakes in the World

By Quake Tracker Live Editorial · Published November 9, 2026

The largest earthquakes are called megathrust earthquakes. They happen where one tectonic plate slides under another along a subduction zone, and the plate boundary can rupture over hundreds of kilometers. Nearly everything in the top group below is a megathrust event. This guide lists the ten largest earthquakes recorded to date using moment magnitude, with dates and values taken from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) earthquake catalog.

Two caveats. First, magnitudes for older events are reconstructed from archival seismograms and are revised from time to time, so rankings can shift by a tenth. Second, the list stops where ties begin, and the tenth place is a five-way tie at magnitude 8.6.

The top ten at a glance

The biggest five, in more detail

1. Chile, 1960: M9.5

The strongest earthquake ever recorded by instruments struck southern Chile on May 22, 1960. The rupture extended roughly 1,000 km along the coast near Valdivia and was followed by a tsunami that crossed the Pacific Ocean and caused damage and deaths in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines. It was preceded by a series of strong foreshocks the day before, including one of about magnitude 8. The 1960 event is the benchmark that all other megaquakes are compared with.

2. Alaska, 1964: M9.2

The Good Friday earthquake is the largest in U.S. history. Shaking lasted about four minutes, and tsunamis caused most of the roughly 130 deaths. It provided crucial evidence for plate tectonics. We cover it in our guide to the largest earthquakes in U.S. history.

3. Sumatra-Andaman, 2004: M9.1

On December 26, 2004, a rupture of about 1,200 to 1,300 km opened along the Sunda megathrust off northern Sumatra. The tsunami it generated crossed the Indian Ocean and killed more than 220,000 people in about 14 countries, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. It led to the creation of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System and to a general upgrade of tsunami warning around the world.

3. Tohoku, Japan, 2011: M9.1

The earthquake of March 11, 2011 occurred about 70 km off the coast of Japan's Tohoku region. It moved the sea floor by tens of meters in places and generated a tsunami that devastated the coast and caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. Roughly 18,000 people were killed or are missing. Because Japan has one of the densest seismic networks in the world, this is the best-recorded megaquake in history, and the data transformed seismology. You can see current activity for the country on our Japan page.

5. Kamchatka, Russia, 1952: M9.0

On November 4, 1952, a megathrust earthquake ruptured the Kuril-Kamchatka trench. It generated a Pacific-wide tsunami that damaged Hawaii, but it is much less known than other giant earthquakes because it was in a sparsely populated area. The same region produced the magnitude 8.8 earthquake of July 29, 2025, which sent tsunami alerts across the Pacific and reminded scientists that a sequence of large events can occur along the same stretch of trench decades apart.

The other megaquakes

• Maule, Chile, 2010 (M8.8): ruptured a part of the Chile margin that had been identified as a seismic gap. More than 500 people died, from the shaking and from the tsunami that followed. The rupture lay just north of the 1960 one. Chile's strict building codes helped limit the toll for the size of the quake. See our Chile page.
• Ecuador-Colombia, 1906 (M8.8): one of the largest earthquakes of the early instrumental era, generating a tsunami that struck the coast of both countries.
• Rat Islands, 1965 (M8.7): a large earthquake in the western Aleutians, mostly in remote waters.
• Wharton Basin, 2012 (M8.6): an unusual one. It was a strike-slip earthquake within the oceanic plate itself, not on a subduction megathrust. It was one of the largest strike-slip earthquakes ever recorded, and it produced only a small, local tsunami.

What the list shows

• Subduction zones dominate. Giant earthquakes need a very long, wide fault, and nearly all of these ruptured subduction megathrusts, mostly around the Pacific "Ring of Fire". The exceptions in the list are the 1950 Assam-Tibet earthquake, a continental collision event, and the 2012 Wharton Basin strike-slip earthquake.
• They cluster in time. Three of the five largest happened within 12 years, between 1952 and 1964, which may be partly chance and partly a sign of stress transfer along the Pacific rim. This is still debated.
• Size does not equal deaths. The 1960 and 1964 events killed far fewer people than the 2004 Sumatra tsunami, largely because of where the water went and how much warning people had.
• They are rare. Magnitude 8 and larger earthquakes occur about once a year on average, and magnitude 9 and above only a handful of times per century.

How we know these numbers

Before the 1960s, magnitude was measured with scales that saturate for the largest events, which made giants like the 1960 Chile and 1964 Alaska earthquakes look smaller than they were. Modern values come from the moment magnitude scale, which measures the area of the fault and the amount of slip, and which was applied back to old records. See our explainer on the earthquake magnitude scale for how this works. For depth, read about why depth matters.

To check whether anything large has happened recently, see the biggest earthquakes list or today's earthquakes.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• USGS: Largest earthquakes in the world
• USGS Earthquake Catalog search
• USGS: Tohoku-Oki, Japan, earthquake of 11 March 2011
• NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information: Tsunami data

This guide is general information, not professional or emergency advice. Quake Tracker Live is not an official warning system; follow instructions from local authorities.