Venezuela faces tragedy after you have registered a in a matter of seconds. Hundreds of buildings have collapsed and emergency workers are working hard in cities like Caracas, where they ask people for silence to try to hear possible survivors in the rubble. The images are reminiscent of other tragedies of recent years.
Although at the moment the authorities cannot detail how many fatalities and how many injured, the US Geological Survey has already warned of a possible, with between 10,000 and 100,000 dead.
In general, larger earthquakes do not have to cause more fatalities. It depends on the area in which the earthquake is felt and the nature of its buildings or the density of its populations. But the situation seen in Venezuela is worrying and reminds us of some that have already been seen in recent years in places like Haiti, China, Türkiye or Morocco.
The worst earthquakes in recent years
Almost 2,000 years ago in China, the seismoscope was invented, a simple device that attempted to record earthquakes. We had to wait until the 19th century for modern seismographs to appear, precedents of the current ones, which not only allow detecting the movement and violence of friction between tectonic plates: they also even measure its magnitude.
Looking back at history, it is worth highlighting the Shaanxi earthquake in Chinain the year 1556. Contemporary studies suggest that it was of magnitude 8 and could have caused more than 830,000 victims. Nowadays, the earthquake figures are not so devastating, but they continue to produce disturbing figures.
China has several earthquakes among the most devastating in recent decades. He Tangshan earthquake in 1976 it is considered one of the most serious in the modern world. Official figures indicate that 242,419 people dieds, but some estimates raise this number up to three times more. The Haiyuan in 1920 and magnitude 7.8 killed 273,000. And already in 2008, the one in Sichuan (7.9) left 87,500 victims.
One of the most memorable catastrophes in recent history was the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. The earthquake was magnitude 9 (equaled only by Japan in 2011). It happened 120 km west of Sumatra, in the ocean, causing waves of up to 30 meters and affecting several countries, from Indonesia to Africa. It resulted in a figure of 280,000 official victims.
If the worst omens come true (the US Seismological Service predicted between 10,000 and 100,000 victims in Venezuela), the earthquake recorded this June 24 could appear next, just after the earthquake that occurred Haiti in 2010 (about 316,000 dead) and the Kashmir earthquake (in Pakistan and India) in 2005, with 87,350 victims.
Another recent earthquake was the one that occurred Türkiye in 2023. It was also a seismic doublet, this one of magnitudes 7.8 and 7.7, and resulted in 62,000 deaths. the same year Morocco It also suffered another devastating earthquake of magnitude 6.8, but fortunately the death toll did not exceed 3,000.
