The study found that the largest earthquake in history occurred in Chile 3,800 years ago

by Tom Yun

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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.

James Goff, co-author of the study and visiting professor at the University of Southampton, said in a 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 deposits and many monsters that would have lived quietly in the sea before being dumped inland. And we found all of these things very high and far from land, so it couldn’t have been a storm that put them there,” he added.

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

“The locals were 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 will never 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 those rocks could only be moved by a tsunami from northern Chile, and you’d need something like a 9.5 magnitude earthquake to generate them. We’ve found them now,” 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 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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