Great Chilean Earthquake - May 22, 1960

On this day in 1960, the largest earthquake in recorded history, a magnitude 9.5, hit off the coast of Chile.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class. It's a production of I
Heart Radio. Hi. Everyone, welcome to This Day in History Class,
where we uncover the remnants of history every day. Today
is Mayen. The day was made twenty second, nineteen sixty,

(00:27):
the largest earthquake ever recorded hit Chile, a, leaving two
million people without homes at least three thousand people injured
in about one thousand, six hundred and fifty five people
did The previous day, a series of four shocks had
hit in Chile as people were preparing for the commemoration

(00:47):
of the Battle of Ikike, a naval battle during the
War of the Pacific. A quake with a magnitude of
eight point to caused destruction in the coastal town of Concepcion.
Tiles President called off the day's events to put together
an emergency response. A couple more earthquakes occurred the next
day in Concepcion, with the last happening only fifteen minutes

(01:11):
before the Baldivia earthquake. The earthquakes traveled south in a
sequence to the big one. At about three eleven pm
local time, a nine point five magnitude earthquake hit about
one hundred miles off the coast of southern til A,
though some estimates have put it at a nine point
four or a nine point six. The epicenter of the

(01:35):
earthquake was in the Pacific Ocean near the town of Lumaco,
though the city most affected by the quake was Baldivia.
It was a megathrust earthquake, or a large earthquake that
occurs in a subduction zone where one tectonic plate is
thrust under another. This quake happened when a six d
and twenty mile long part of the Nazca Plate, an

(01:56):
oceanic plate that makes up a big part of the
Pacific Ocean floor, are plunged under the South American Plate.
It was and still is the largest earthquake ever instrumentally recorded.
The seismic main shock lowered a quarter of Chile's outer
coast by a few feet, and it expanded the area
of the country. The earth movement triggered a bunch of

(02:19):
other natural disasters like tsunamis landslides, a flood of volcanic eruption,
and a sage or surface oscillation on a lake in Argentina.
Subsidence or sinking of the ground due to the earthquake
caused flooding in Chile that changed the impactic shorelines and
made marine navigational charts obsolete. The tsunami that the earthquake

(02:43):
triggered caused deaths and damage as far away as Hawaii, Japan,
and the Philippines. At Hilo Bay, on the main island
of Hawaii, huge waves killed sixty one people. Waves up
to eighteen feet are five point five meters hit Hanshu,
Pan's main island, killing a hundred and thirty eight people
and destroying sixteen hundred homes. The tsunami even caused damage

(03:07):
in Los Angeles, San Diego and Long Beach, California. In
the Philippines, the tsunami caused at least twenty one deaths.
Waves were observed in the Pacific Ocean Basin, the Atlantic Ocean,
and the Indian Ocean, making it the first globally recorded tsunami.
Some seizmologists have linked the eruption of the cordoned Gallier

(03:30):
Volcano and Tilas Lake district to the earthquake, as it
erupted on May after about forty years of inactivity. Other
earthquakes occurred in the region in the sixteenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries, and many after shocks followed in the months
after the nineteen sixty Valdivia quake. The global impact of

(03:51):
the tsunami led to the creation of the Pacific Tsunami
Warning System. In nineteen sixty and eight point eight magnitude
quake occurred off the coast of Central Chile. Scientists suggested
that earthquake may have been the result of the stress
build up from the nineteen sixty earthquake. I'm Eve step

(04:13):
Cote and hopefully you know a little more about history
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(04:43):
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