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The 1995 Neftegorsk earthquake occurred on 28 May at on northern
Sakhalin Island in the
Russian Far East
The Russian Far East (russian: Дальний Восток России, r=Dal'niy Vostok Rossii, p=ˈdalʲnʲɪj vɐˈstok rɐˈsʲiɪ) is a region in Northeast Asia. It is the easternmost part of Russia and the Asian continent; and is admini ...
. It was the most destructive earthquake known within the current territory of Russia, with a magnitude of and maximum
Mercalli intensity
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 ...
of IX (''Violent'') that devastated the oil town of
Neftegorsk, where 1,989 of its 3,977 citizens were killed, and another 750 injured.
90% of the victims were killed by the collapse of 17 five-story residential buildings. While Western media generally attributed the collapses to allegedly poor construction and shoddy materials of Soviet-era construction, a geotechnical study faulted a failure to accommodate the possibility of soil liquefaction in an area that was considered "practically aseismic".
The Belgian
Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) is a research unit of the University of Louvain (UCLouvain). It is part of the School of Public Health located on the UCLouvain Brussels Woluwe campus, in Brussels, Belgium.
CRED has ...
' EM-DAT database places the total damage at
$64.1 million, while the United States'
National Geophysical Data Center
The United States National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) provided scientific stewardship, products and services for geophysical data describing the solid earth, marine, and solar-terrestrial environment, as well as earth observations from spac ...
assesses the damage at $300 million.
[
This quake was not only catastrophic, it was totally unexpected: earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 6 were not known to occur in the area of northern Sakhalin Island. It is also of great scientific interest (some 20 papers have been published) because it occurred near a poorly known ]tectonic plate
Plate tectonics (from the la, label=Late Latin, tectonicus, from the grc, τεκτονικός, lit=pertaining to building) is the generally accepted scientific theory that considers the Earth's lithosphere to comprise a number of large te ...
boundary where the Okhotsk Plate
The Okhotsk Plate is a minor tectonic plate covering the Kamchatka Peninsula, Magadan Oblast, and Sakhalin Island of Russia; Hokkaido, Kantō and Tōhoku regions of Japan; the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as the disputed Kuril Islands. It was ...
(connected with North American Plate
The North American Plate is a tectonic plate covering most of North America, Cuba, the Bahamas, extreme northeastern Asia, and parts of Iceland and the Azores. With an area of , it is the Earth's second largest tectonic plate, behind the Pacific ...
) is crashing into the Amurian Plate
The Amurian Plate (or Amur Plate; also occasionally referred to as the China Plate, not to be confused with the South China Subplate) is a minor tectonic plate in the northern and eastern hemispheres. It covers Manchuria, the Korean Peninsula ...
(part of the Eurasian Plate
The Eurasian Plate is a tectonic plate that includes most of the continent of Eurasia (a landmass consisting of the traditional continents of Europe and Asia), with the notable exceptions of the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian subcontinent and ...
), and indicates that the plate boundary is associated with a north–south striking seismic belt that runs the length of Sakhalin. More precisely, this earthquake occurred on the Upper Piltoun fault (also known as the Gyrgylan'i—Ossoy fault), which branches off the main Sakhalin-Hokkaido fault that runs along the east side of the island.
of surface rupturing was observed (46 km including a branching fault), with an estimated average lateral displacement of about 4 meters, but up to in some places. (This compares to 14 km of slip estimated to have accumulated on the Sakhalin-Hokkaido fault in the last 4 million years.) The unusual strength of this quake and length of rupturing, and the low level of seismic activity beforehand, has been attributed to the accumulation of strain over a long period of time on a locked fault segment.[.]
See also
* List of earthquakes in 1995
This is a list of earthquakes in 1995. Only earthquakes of magnitude 6 or above are included, unless they result in damage or casualties, or are notable for some other reason. All dates are listed according to UTC time.
By death toll
By ma ...
* List of earthquakes in Russia
Earthquakes in Russia have occasionally been damaging and deadly.
Map
Some of the largest Russian earthquakes since the latter half of the 20th century are the 1958/1963 and 2006/2007 earthquakes in the Kuril Islands near Japan, as well as the ...
Notes
Sources
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* , Paper No. 10.21.
* .
External links
7.5 Quake Kills 300 on Russia's Sakhalin Island
– ''Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
''
The Sakhalin earthquake of May 27, 1995
– Earthquake Engineering Research Institute
*
{{Earthquakes in Russia
Neftegorsk Earthquake, 1995
Sakhalin
Neftegorsk Earthquake, 1995
Earthquakes in the Russian Far East
May 1995 events in Asia