Every magnitude-7-or-larger earthquake since 1900 in the USGS catalog, 1,618 events, and the handful that rearranged coastlines.
Data: USGS Earthquake Catalog (ComCat) · Basemap: OpenFreeMap
Seismographs good enough to size an earthquake anywhere on the planet date from about 1900. Since then the USGS catalog holds 1,618 events of magnitude 7 or larger, roughly fifteen a year, and 108 of magnitude 8 or larger. Circle size and colour scale with magnitude; hover any event for its name, depth and whether it raised a tsunami.
Centre the map on the Pacific and the pattern needs no caption. Where oceanic plates dive under continents and island arcs (Chile, Peru, Mexico, the Aleutians, Kamchatka, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Tonga, New Zealand), the plate boundary stores centuries of strain and releases it in minutes. Around four in five of the largest earthquakes happen on this rim.
The first half of the century is filtered on this beat. The catalog is sparser and locations rougher, but the big ones are all here: the 1906 Ecuador–Colombia M8.8 (the same year as San Francisco), the 1923 Kantō earthquake that destroyed Tokyo, and the 1950 Assam–Tibet M8.6, the largest continental earthquake on record.
Five of the twelve largest earthquakes ever recorded happened within thirteen years, all on the Pacific rim: Kamchatka 1952 (M9.0), the Andreanof Islands 1957 (M8.6), Valdivia 1960 (M9.5), Prince William Sound 1964 (M9.2) and the Rat Islands 1965 (M8.7). The M9s pulse; the labels name them.
The largest earthquake in the instrumental record. About 1,000 km of the fault between the Nazca and South American plates slipped by tens of metres; the tsunami reached 25 m on the Chilean coast and was still ten metres high when it hit Hilo, Hawaii, fifteen hours later. Two days after the mainshock, the volcano Cordón Caulle erupted.
The twenty-first century's two M9s were both subduction ruptures under the sea. Sumatra–Andaman on 26 December 2004 unzipped 1,300 km of trench and sent the Indian Ocean tsunami into fourteen countries. Tōhoku on 11 March 2011 moved Honshu 2.4 m east and produced waves up to 40 m high. The chapter is filtered to 2004 onwards.
Magnitude is logarithmic: each whole step is about 32 times more energy, so an M9 releases a thousand times the energy of an M7. Extruding every event into a column scaled to that energy makes the point the flat map cannot: a century of M7s is a lawn, and the M9s are towers.