Earthquakes cause tremors inside the earth that can be felt by humans most of the times. However, not always an earthquake may be noticeable to us, except the sensitive seismological devices that monitor the range and intensity of these quakes. Approximately 500,000 earthquakes happen round the year and of these, only 100,000 are felt by humans and yet just 100 cause any sort of damage. One of the most active earthquake zones is South California that witnesses around 10,000 earthquakes annually and majority of them are not felt.
Earthquakes have a potential to cause wide range destruction. For example, the greatest ever earthquake was in Chile with the magnitude of 9.5. However, the deadliest earthquake to be in records was in China on 23rd Jan 1556 that took lives of approximately 830,000. Another thing about these quakes is movements inside the earth crust. Since the tectonic plates are moving, it is causing various unimaginable things. Like, San Francisco is getting closer to LA by 2 inches annually. So, it can be seen that the two cities would meet eventually, even if the time period is about in million years.
Another such incident is reported to have happened in Feb 2010 in Chile. A city moved 10 feet towards the West because of an earthquake of magnitude 8.8. The level of disaster can be very high. One of the best recent examples is Indian Ocean earthquake that happened in 2004 and caused enormous Tsunamis and killed more than 230,000 people in over 14 countries. The impact was one of the worst in present times and the also, the duration of this quake was the longest of earthquakes every observed.
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