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Under the direction of archaeologists and geologists from the University of Chile, an international team of researchers has found evidence of the largest known earthquake in the history of mankind. It’s about a ‘megaterremoto’ of magnitude 9.5, followed by a gigantic tsunami more than 8,000 km long that caused human populations to abandon the coasts for more than a thousand years.
The earthquake took place about 3,800 years ago in northern Chile, when the rupture of a tectonic plate raised the coast of that region. The subsequent tsunami was so powerful that it created waves of more than 20 meters that traveled as far as New Zealand, where they carried car-sized rocks several hundred meters inland.