The Ten Largest Earthquakes Ever Recorded
March 2, 2026
Only five earthquakes of magnitude 9 or greater have been recorded since instruments capable of measuring them existed. All ten of the largest happened in the same tectonic setting, and every one of them is visible on the map.
The list
Several earthquakes share magnitude 8.6, so the ranking below position 9 is not meaningful — the uncertainty on a great-earthquake magnitude is around ±0.1 to ±0.2. The full USGS top-20 is on the largest earthquakes page.
| # | Mw | Location | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 9.5 | Valdivia, Chile | 1960 |
| 2 | 9.2 | Prince William Sound, Alaska | 1964 |
| 3 | 9.1 | Sumatra–Andaman, Indonesia | 2004 |
| 4 | 9.1 | Tōhoku, Japan | 2011 |
| 5 | 9.0 | Kamchatka, Russia | 1952 |
| 6 | 8.8 | Maule, Chile | 2010 |
| 7 | 8.8 | Off the coast of Ecuador | 1906 |
| 8 | 8.7 | Rat Islands, Alaska | 1965 |
| 9 | 8.6 | Assam–Tibet | 1950 |
| 10 | 8.6 | Northern Sumatra (2005), and others tied at 8.6 | 2005 |
They are all subduction earthquakes
Every earthquake in the list ruptured a megathrust — the gently sloping fault where one plate slides beneath another. Only a subduction megathrust offers a fault big enough, hundreds of kilometres in both length and width, to store the energy of a magnitude 9. Transform faults such as the San Andreas top out near magnitude 8 because they are narrow; ocean ridges rarely exceed magnitude 6.
The regions repeat: Chile, Alaska and the Aleutians, Kamchatka and the Kurils, Sumatra, Japan. These are the longest, fastest-converging, most strongly locked subduction zones on Earth.
The 1960 Chile earthquake stands apart
The magnitude 9.5 earthquake of 22 May 1960 ruptured about 1,000 km of the boundary between the Nazca and South American plates. It released more energy than every other earthquake of the 1960s combined, and its tsunami killed people in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines up to a day later. No larger earthquake has been recorded since, and given the length of the world’s subduction zones, a magnitude 10 is generally considered physically implausible.
Set the map to 1960 and raise the minimum magnitude to 8. The single huge red circle off central Chile, ringed by aftershocks, is the largest earthquake in the entire record.
Biggest is not deadliest
None of the ten largest is among the ten deadliest. Death tolls are driven by depth, proximity to cities, building quality and tsunamis. The 2010 Haiti earthquake (magnitude 7.0) and the 1976 Tangshan earthquake (magnitude 7.6) each killed far more people than most of the earthquakes on this list, because they struck shallow and directly beneath dense population.
Sources
- U.S. Geological Survey — “20 Largest Earthquakes in the World”, event pages in the USGS Earthquake Catalog.
- U.S. Geological Survey — “Cool Earthquake Facts”, “Can a magnitude 10 earthquake occur?”