Famous Earthquakes

• The places of the Minoan people on Crete were destroyed by an earthquake in about 1750BC.
  
  
• The earliest documented earthquake hit the ancient Greek town of Sparta in 464BC, killing 20,000 people.
  
  
• In AD62 the musical debut of the Roman Emperor Nero in Naples was ended by an earthquake.
  
  
• In July 1201 an earthquake rocked every city in the eastern Mediterranean. It may have killed well over 1 million people.
  
  
• In 1556 an earthquake, which is tought to have been about 8.3 on the Richter scale, hit the province of Shansi in China.
  
  
• The 1755 Lisbon earthquake prompted the French writer Voltaire to write Candide, a book that inspired the French and American revolutions.
  
  
• In 1906 San Francisco, USA, was shaken by an earthquake that lasted three minutes. The earthquake started fires that burned the city almost flat.
  
  
• The 1923 earthquake which devastates Tokyo and Yokohama also made the sea-bed in nearby Sagami Bay drop over 400 m.
  
  
• The 1970 earthquake in Peru shook 50 million cubic metres of rock and ice off the peak Huascaran. They roared down at 350 km/h and swept away the town of Yungay.
  
  
• The Michoacán earthquake of 1985 killed 35,000 in Mexico City 360 km away. Silts (fine soils) under the city amplified the ground movements 75 times.