A study finds that the largest earthquake in history occurred in Chile 3,800 years ago

TORONTO (CTV) – A new study has found evidence that the largest earthquake in history may have been a 9.5-magnitude Chile earthquake that occurred nearly four thousand years ago.

Researchers from Chile, the United Kingdom, Australia and France say that this earthquake occurred 3,800 years ago in the Atacama Desert, located in present-day northern Chile, and caused a tsunami that affected coasts as far away as New Zealand and possibly Japan.

The results were published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances earlier this month.

According to the study, the ancient earthquake’s strength is comparable to the 1960 earthquake in Valdivia, southern Chile.

The magnitude of the Valdivia earthquake was estimated to be between 9.4 to 9.6, making it the strongest earthquake ever recorded. However, that earthquake cut 800 kilometers in length. This newly discovered earthquake in the Atacama Desert is estimated to have extended 1,000 km.

“It was thought that you couldn’t have an event of this scale in the north of the country just because you couldn’t get a rupture long enough,” said James Goff, co-author of the study and visiting professor at the University of Southampton. Press release. “But now we’ve found evidence of a rupture about 1,000 kilometers off the coast of the Atacama Desert and that’s massive.”

The researchers found large deposits of coastal rocks deep inland, indicating evidence of a massive tsunami. They also found ocean sediments, as well as the remains of marine life that would have swept through the desert due to tsunamis.

“The Atacama Desert is one of the driest and hostile environments in the world, and it has always been difficult to find evidence of tsunamis there,” Goff said in the statement.

“However, we did find evidence of marine sediments and a lot of monsters that would have lived quietly in the sea before they were dumped inland. And we found all of these things very high and far from land, so it couldn’t be a storm put them there.”

Researchers say the earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused “exceptional social disruption” to the hunter-gatherer and hunter-gatherer communities that lived there at the time.

“The locals weren’t left there with nothing,” Goff said. “Our archaeological work found that massive social disruption ensued as communities moved inland out of reach of the tsunami.”

Goff said that the people of the Atacama desert did not return to the coast until more than a thousand years after the earthquake.

“It is possible that tradition passed down from generation to generation has fostered this resilient behaviour, although we won’t know for sure,” he said.

On the other side of the South Pacific, researchers also found evidence in New Zealand that the tsunami may have thrown car-sized rocks hundreds of meters inland.

“In New Zealand, we said that those rocks could only have been moved by a tsunami from northern Chile, and they would need something like a 9.5 magnitude earthquake to generate them. And now we’ve found them,” Goff said.

The researchers hope their findings will provide a better understanding of the effects of severe earthquakes and emphasize the importance of learning how to build a society that is resilient to such natural disasters.

“This is the oldest example we found in the Southern Hemisphere where an earthquake and tsunami had such a catastrophic impact on people’s lives, and there is a lot to learn from this,” Goff said. “The next time an event like this occurs, the consequences could be dire unless we learn from these results.”

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