On March 28, 2025, Eastern Asia, specifically Myanmar and Thailand, experienced an earthquake that took the lives of over 3,000 people and caused billions of dollars in damage. The earthquake had a magnitude of 7.7.
Any earthquake within the scale of 7.0 -7.9 is considered a major earthquake, which on the Richter scale is very high. The Richter scale was introduced and created in 1934 by Charles F. Richter with collaboration from Beno Gutenberg. This scale is to determine the magnitude and size of every earthquake.
During this event, there were many mass casualties with an estimated number of 3,550 deaths, nearly 5,000 injuries, and over 200 people missing. The estimated death toll is up to 10,000 casualties. During this earthquake a 33 story high rise building under construction collapsed. This ended up killing 10 more individuals and left dozens missing under all the ruble. This wasn’t the only damage to buildings, there was significant damage in a 125 mile long stretch that was 10 miles wide. It is estimated that there is around 77.5 billion dollars in damages to homes, businesses, buildings, everything in the radius of the earthquake. In total around 18.3 million people, and 4.04 million homes were affected by the earthquake.
Michigan is a state that’s pretty safe from earthquakes, but other natural disasters can occur such as tornados, floods, droughts, and extreme hot or cold weather. Michigan we have fault lines but we rarely have earthquakes. The reason why we don’t get many earthquakes if not many is because our fault lines are very old. From the author Kylie Martin she says “ fault lines that were potentially visible long ago are now buried deep under sedimentary deposits”. This is because the fault lines under Michigan were created over 1.1 billion years ago. Long ago there was an active phase with these fault lines which created many earthquakes to happen. This phase lasted for millions of years but ended long before the existence of humans. The most prominent fault line in Michigan is the Keweenaw Fault. This runs betweens the Keweenaw Peninsula in the upper Peninsula. Additionally, Michigan doesn’t have many earthquakes is because the state is located in the interior of a tectonic plate whereas places that get many bad earthquakesare located on the boundy of the tectonic plate. This is because when the tectonic plates move and collide together.
