The Philippines earthquake is the largest this year, but it could have been bigger, and here’s why

The 7.8-magnitude quake that struck off the coast of Mindanao, the Philippines’ second-largest island, at 7:37 a.m. local time is the largest quake to strike anywhere in the world so far this year, according to U.S. Geological Survey records. But the quake, which killed at least 35 people and injured dozens, was actually on the smaller side for the type of fault it occurred in, says seismologist Lucy Jones.

The magnitude of an earthquake is determined by the rupture area of ​​the fault, the larger the area, the larger the earthquake. The highest magnitudes only occur at plate boundaries, “because that’s the only place there’s a large enough error,” Jones says. For context, there is about one earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or higher somewhere in the world and dozens of earthquakes of magnitude between 7.0 and 7.9 each year on average; This year there have been six of the latter so far.

Jones explains that subduction zones — places where one plate dives beneath another — are where the biggest earthquakes occur because the fault dips at a shallow angle, creating a larger area of ​​slip. By comparison, although strike-slip faults in California can produce an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 or higher, the faults there go straight down and quickly strike the hotter rocks below, stopping the movement and restraining the earthquake.

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Some subduction zones, such as those off Chile, can produce the largest earthquakes ever measured, because they contain younger rocks that dip at a particularly shallow angle. But in the part of the Philippines where the last earthquake occurred, the rocks are older and cooler, so the area that slid was not as large as it could have been.

This area is “a bit of a mess” because it’s a jumble of pieces of tectonic plates, meaning there’s no clean fault line to slide, “so you don’t have a big piece that can move at once,” Jones says. As a result, you get a somewhat smaller earthquake. However, Monday’s quake appears to be among the largest ever recorded in the Cotabato Trench, according to seismologists Judith Hubbard and Kyle Bradley.

There are reports that the Philippines earthquake caused significant damage, including buildings. About one million people experienced severe shaking (intensity 8)—the third highest rating on the Modified Mercalli intensity scale—and the earthquake triggered a landslide that resulted in most of the related deaths.

Because the fault is a subduction zone and underwater, it displaces water, causing tsunamis. In this case, the largest tsunami wave measured was about 1 meter, much smaller than the tsunami wave of about 40 meters that resulted from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan.

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