The 1817 Santiago del Estero earthquake took place in the

province A province is almost always an administrative division within a country or sovereign state, state. The term derives from the ancient Roman ''Roman province, provincia'', which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire ...

Santiago del Estero Santiago del Estero (, Spanish for ''Saint-James-Upon-The-Lagoon'') is the capital of Santiago del Estero Province in northern Argentina. It has a population of 252,192 inhabitants, () making it the twelfth largest city in the country, with a surf ...

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

, on 4 July at about 05:30 PM. It was estimated to be 7.0 on the

Richter magnitude scale The Richter scale —also called the Richter magnitude scale, Richter's magnitude scale, and the Gutenberg–Richter scale—is a measure of the strength of earthquakes, developed by Charles Francis Richter and presented in his landmark 1935 ...

. Its

epicenter The epicenter, epicentre () or epicentrum in seismology is the point on the Earth's surface directly above a hypocenter or focus, the point where an earthquake or an underground explosion originates. Surface damage Before the instrumental pe ...

was at , at a depth of 30 km. The earthquake was felt with grade VIII in the

Mercalli intensity scale The Modified Mercalli intensity scale (MM, MMI, or MCS), developed from Giuseppe Mercalli's Mercalli intensity scale of 1902, is a seismic intensity scale used for measuring the intensity of shaking produced by an earthquake. It measures the eff ...

in the provincial capital

, where it caused grave damage.

References

* Instituto Nacional de Prevención Sísmica
''Listado de Terremotos Históricos''
1817 Geography of Santiago del Estero Province Santiago del Estero, 1817 1817 in Argentina July 1817 events 1817 disasters in Argentina {{Argentina-hist-stub