Where this was said
The Good Friday Earthquake: Scale and Overview
At 3:20 · chapter starts 2:10
With the personal anecdotes out of the way, Chuck and Josh get down to the facts. The Good Friday Earthquake struck Alaska on March 27, 1964, registering 9.2 on the Richter scale — second only to Chile's 9.5 in 1960. Despite the colossal force, total deaths numbered 131, which Chuck contextualises as relatively low given that only about 15 people were killed by the earthquake itself; most fatalities came from the tsunamis that followed. Josh makes an argument that runs through the whole episode: this earthquake didn't just destroy — it transformed science [1] — Chuck "The 1964 Alaska Good Friday Earthquake registered 9.2 on the Richter scale — the second most powerful ever recorded, behind only Chile's 9.…" 02:09 . It happened at precisely the moment when the scientific community had the tools and motivation to study it, and what they learned rewrote everything we thought we knew about seismology, tsunamis, and plate tectonics.
Every single one of the ten largest earthquakes ever recorded has been a megathrust earthquake, where one tectonic plate locks with and then slips beneath another.
All 10 of the 10 largest earthquakes ever recorded are megathrust earthquakes — and now we know why. Two tectonic plates collide, lock together under immense pressure, and eventually one gives way in a catastrophic slip, lurching an entire region of the Earth's surface dozens of feet in seconds.
