As previously reported, the 8.8 magnitude earthquake on Wednesday off the east coast of Russia is tied to the sixth strongest recorded.
It lined up along the devastating 2010 Chilean earthquake, killing more than 500 people, causing massive destruction, causing the 1906 earthquake in Ecuador and Colombia, causing tsunamis that killed 1,500 people.
“This is the biggest earthquake we’ve done in more than a decade in the world,” Jeffrey Park, a seismologist and professor of Earth and Planetary Science at Yale University, told CNN News Central on Wednesday.
“It’s one of the top 10 earthquakes measured by humans in the last half century.”
Lisa McNeill, a professor of tectonics at the University of Southampton in the UK, was said to have “ruptured the past of the subduction zone in Krill Kamchatka,” the same structural environment as the 2011 Japan and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
It was a “very big earthquake,” she said. “The subduction zone is where one tectonic plate collides and slides under another earthquake, which creates the largest earthquake on the planet.
“There are no tsunamis as some fault movements do not move much on the seabed,” she added. “In this earthquake, there was a very large burst and slip (the earthquake becomes large), which created a tsunami.”
Joanna Fare Walker, professor of seismic geology and disaster risk reduction at UCL, also mentioned the role of seafloor displacement in driving the tsunami layer.
“Tsutami travels across the ocean at speeds comparable to a jumbo jet,” she said, adding that when the waves reach shallower coastal waters it slows down and builds heights.
