selected
An earthquake registering approximately 7.5 Mw caused Port Royal, Jamaica, to sink below sea level and killed approximately 5,000 people.
Related Wikipedia articles
1692 Jamaica earthquake
Earthquake and tsunami in British Jamaica
The 1692 Jamaica earthquake struck Port Royal, Jamaica, on 7 June. A stopped pocket watch found in the harbour during a 1959 excavation indicated that it occurred around 11:43 AM local time.Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
Moment magnitude scale
Measure of earthquake size, in terms of the energy released
The moment magnitude scale is a measure of an earthquake's magnitude based on its seismic moment. Mw was defined in a 1979 paper by Thomas C. Hanks and Hiroo Kanamori. Similar to the local magnitude/Richter scale (ML ) defined by Charles Francis Richter in 1935, it uses a…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
Port Royal
City in Kingston, Jamaica
Port Royal was a town located at the end of the Palisadoes, at the mouth of Kingston Harbour, in southeastern Jamaica. Founded in 1494 by the Spanish, it was once the largest and most prosperous city in the Caribbean, functioning as the centre of shipping and commerce in the…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)