Overview
Five hundred and eighty-four deaths and about a thousand injuries followed a magnitude 5.9 earthquake at Bab-Tangol in Kerman province, Iran, on 19 December 1977, a toll far out of proportion to the size of the shock. Shaking was rated at Mercalli intensity VII, a grade at which well-built structures suffer only minor damage. The epicentre lies at 30.94 N, 56.53 E, in the arid interior of the Iranian plateau, where villages were built almost entirely of unreinforced adobe and mud brick. Such construction collapses inward without warning, and the concentration of deaths within a small area of moderate shaking is the clearest illustration in the Iranian record of vulnerability rather than magnitude governing the outcome.
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Energy Released
10.7 thousand tons of TNT
About This Earthquake
1977 Iran, Bab-tangol: M5.9 earthquake at shallow crustal focus struck with destructive force. 584 fatalities. Arabian-Eurasian plate collision zone.
Impact Details
| Injuries | 1,000 |
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Frequently Asked Questions
The largest earthquake ever recorded was the 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile, at magnitude 9.5. It generated a tsunami that traveled across the Pacific Ocean and caused damage as far away as Hawaii and Japan. The earthquake killed approximately 1,655 people and left 2 million homeless.
The deadliest earthquake in recorded history was the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake in China, estimated at magnitude 8.0-8.3, which killed approximately 830,000 people. Many casualties resulted from the collapse of yaodong (cave dwellings) carved into loess cliffs. The 2010 Haiti earthquake (M7.0, ~316,000 deaths) was the deadliest in modern times.
Pre-instrumental earthquake magnitudes are estimated from written accounts of damage, felt reports, geological evidence such as fault scarps and liquefaction features, and tsunami records. These methods provide approximate magnitudes with typical uncertainties of 0.3-0.5 magnitude units.
QuakeFYI's historical database covers earthquakes from approximately 2150 BC to the present, with over 5,700 significant events. Written records from ancient China, Greece, and the Middle East provide some of the earliest accounts. Instrumental recording began around 1900 with the first standardized seismographs.
An earthquake swarm is a sequence of many earthquakes occurring in a localized area over weeks to months without a clear mainshock. Unlike aftershock sequences where one large event is followed by smaller ones, swarms have no single dominant event. They are often associated with volcanic activity or fluid migration in the crust.