Top 5 Most Powerful Earthquakes Recorded

At exactly 5:36 PM on March 27, 1964, Anchorage, Alaska, was snapped in half by a magnitude 9.2 earthquake that dropped city blocks into the earth. That’s number five, but just four years earlier, in 1960, a seismic event off the coast of Valdivia, Chile, unleashed more than twice the energy-leveling cities and generating tsunamis powerful enough to strike Japan days later. For number three, turn to the 2004 Indian Ocean quake near Sumatra, clocking in at magnitude 9.1; its tsunamis raced across 14 countries, killing over 225,000 people in just hours. Higher still is number two: the 1964 Good Friday quake is dwarfed by the 1960 Valdivia event, but the 9.3 magnitude Aceh-Andaman earthquake in 2004 almost split the planet’s crust for 1,600 kilometers. But nothing matches the number one: on May 22, 1960, Chile’s Great Earthquake triggered land subsidence, volcano eruptions, and a Pacific wave that circled the globe-the only quake ever recorded at a staggering magnitude 9.5.