Talk:Lists of 21st-century earthquakes

Change from List of 2004-2009 earthquakes
This new list incorporates most of the events listed in the 2004-2009 page together with other earthquakes from the 'List of earthquakes' and the 'Historical earthquakes' pages from the end of 2000. The time range for the existing page seemed very arbitrary and the new one fits in with recently revamped Historical earthquakes and the List of twentieth century earthquakes.

I have removed all earthquakes with magnitudes less than 5.5, apart from one that caused a fatality, and a list of these appears below. If we start including smaller quakes this list will become unmanageable. I suspect that for a global list the minimum should actually be set even higher than that. Smaller events should be added to the relevant country lists.

Any comments should be left here or at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Earthquakes. Mikenorton (talk) 20:49, 30 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I think that the list should only include events with some significance involved, and not just taking into account the magnitude. For example a widely felt 5.4 in southern California is going to be more significant than a 6.5 in the middle of the Indian ocean with no-one to feel it. I notice that at the moment the list has a number of events of 5.5 or larger located in places that have these size quakes on a regular basis with no significance other than magnitude, and it is these that need removing from the list. There are hundreds of quakes above 5.5 every year, and we can't include them all here. However, all M7+ events should be included, as well as events that caused major damage or fatalities. If a smaller event has its own article then it should certainly be considered. RapidR (talk) 02:40, 31 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I didn't mean to suggest that magnitude is the only thing worth considering, it was just something of a blunt tool that I used to start to cut the size of the article down. I agree with what your saying about M7+ and including smaller quakes in areas where people are actually affected. I left in a 4.9 in Brazil that led to a death, for instance, and would think that all events with fatalities should be in. Also if a country experiences its strongest earthquake in a hundred years, it should be in, even if it's a 5.3 that caused no damage. This list is just my take on things, most of the effort went into achieving a consistent format with other lists. There is still a lot to do - actual sources need to be added for all these events, just saying that they came from the USGS is not enough IMO, although I don't think that's necessary for earthquakes that have their own article. Mikenorton (talk) 08:10, 31 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I think a single reference to the USGS list of significant quakes for each year would be enough, and add news sources for any other events not in the USGS list, or significant events that received worldwide news coverage. If we added news sources for every event without an article for instance, then the ref list could potentially become unnecessarily long. Getting reliable magnitude sources from the news can sometimes be a problem as they tend to use the initial data, which may be later up/downgraded, which is why we will need to reference the USGS in some way. Also I think we should add the magnitude scales used to the list (ie. 6.0 Mw), and the source of the magnitude if it doesn't come from the USGS.  RapidR (talk) 14:03, 31 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Agreed with using a generic USGS reference at the base of each year section, probably add this one too as it's easier to get more info on most of the individual quakes. Agreed also about the magnitude scales and sources, I'll have a go at some of this when I have the energy. Mikenorton (talk) 14:44, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

This list should be devide into Decade such as List of 2000s earthquakes, List of 2010s earthquakes because in the future this list will be very long.--Tranletuhan (talk) 01:41, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

"Recent" title
"Recent" is not a good word to use in an encyclopaedia as it goes out of date. "Since 2001" or "twentyfirst century" would be better. Pol098 (talk) 18:01, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You're right it's not perfect. For consistency I would go for 'List of 21st century earthquakes'. Mikenorton (talk) 18:26, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Reference to Red Cross fatality estimates
I tried to google the Red Cross to find out right from the horses mouth what their estimate was for the number of fatalities in haiti, but could not locate any page on their website with this info. However, many news media report using  this Red Cross estimate. Just wondering how the press knows? Ottawahitech (talk) 13:44, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Criteria for inclusion
Given the article name, I now think this list should only include the most notable and well known earthquakes of the 21st century, perhaps the criteria could be at least 10 deaths or above magnitude 8.0. Since there are about 150ish quakes per year above magnitude 6, the list will never be complete for magnitude 6 and larger, and even if it was it would be unnecessarily long. These smaller and less notable earthquakes can be included in articles like 2010 earthquakes. Thoughts anyone? RapidR (talk) 00:00, 15 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Something like that makes sense to me, although I might set the bar a little lower than 8.0 magnitude, but definitely should be 7+. Mikenorton (talk) 09:27, 15 May 2010 (UTC)


 * OK, I'm now thinking mag 7.0+ or with at least 2 deaths. However, to ensure consistency this may mean adding all magnitude 7s from every previous year. RapidR (talk) 20:22, 15 May 2010 (UTC)


 * According to the Utsu catalogue, there were 58 earthquakes of magnitude greater than 7 in the eight years from 2001-2008 inclusive, the NGDC database, which is arguably more complete (Utsu was handing over his catalogue to IISEE during this period) gives 78 earthquakes for the same period. I guess it would mean adding two to three events for each year to what we have already, and we would lose far more than that overall. I just feel that capping it at 8.0 is a bit fierce. Mikenorton (talk) 23:34, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

2010 Central Canada earthquake
I am trying to think of the best way for people to find information. It appears to be impossible to link the June 23rd earthquake to any list as it is non-notable (however, I live over 100 km away and it moved chairs and a sofa in my house). I had it on the list, but it was removed. How about a page listing countries? Can anyone think of anything better??l santry (talk) 15:48, 24 June 2010 (UTC)


 * There is already List of earthquakes in Canada, where it is already listed, we should probably put something in the lede about looking for lists of earthquakes by country in List of earthquakes, which links through to all the other lists. Mikenorton (talk) 15:58, 24 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Link to List of earthquakes added to lede. Mikenorton (talk) 16:17, 24 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Perfect! Thanks!!l santry (talk) 19:40, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

More useful
This article would be much more useful if all earthquakes were in one table so that, for instance, the magnitudes could be compared over the decade, rather than the year. I want to find the 5 biggest earthquakes in the past ten years which is a really slow process at this point because they can't be compared when they are part of separate tables. Can this be changed?202.74.204.112 (talk) 02:17, 7 November 2010 (UTC)


 * It used to be one big table, but was broken down into sections by year to make it easier to navigate. It makes it more difficult to do the kind of search that you describe, but I think that the advantages outway the disadvantages, others may disagree. Mikenorton (talk) 02:59, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Sorting broken
Clicking on the magnitude column sorting gadget on some of the tables on this page breaks the table formatting. Try 2007, for example. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.137.5.129 (talk) 14:02, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

chart and haiti
I can not see haiti in the chart. Should be removed. --Itu (talk) 18:22, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Date of February Christchurch earthquake
The table of earthquakes incorrectly records the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake as 21 February 2011, this earthquake killed 185 people. You can verify this on Geonet site. Cathy — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cathy Adair (talk • contribs) 10:54, 26 March 2013 (UTC)


 * The table uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which sometimes leads to a discrepancy with the date in local time, as is the case here. Mikenorton (talk) 12:29, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Deleting Some Earthquakes
Hello, all! I just had something to point out. The article says that it is listing earthquakes with a magnitude of 7 and or above. I was just wondering if we delete the earthquakes that are 6.9 or below, or we change the description of the article to magnitude 6 or above. I also have a suggestion that we delete the earthquakes that are below 6.0 magnitude, UNLESS the death toll is very high, like at least 500 or maybe 1,000.

Sincerely, Katemorganishere (talk) 04:27, 23 September 2013 (UTC)


 * The criteria given in the lead section says "earthquakes of magnitude 7 and above, or which caused fatalities". This is similar to the criteria used for determining notability of earthquake articles WikiProject_Earthquakes/notability_guidelines, although is a little less restrictive. The criteria also match those used in similar articles - list of 20th-century earthquakes and historical earthquakes. Fatal earthquakes are generally notable so I think that we should keep those - non-destructive magnitude 7+ events could perhaps be trimmed. Mikenorton (talk) 05:57, 23 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep only earthquakes with at least 1 fatalities and rest of them delete.Kristijh (talk) 11:55, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

Suggestion - new article with only mag 7 earthquakes
I agree that all the earthquakes with fatalities belong on this page. But it's a bit hard to navigate if you are only interested to learn about mag 7 earthquakes.

I filtered it to mag 7 and greater in my user space here for my own use: User:Robertinventor/earthquakes and suggest it would be a good idea to have that as a separate article. Robert Walker (talk) 14:46, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

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Splitting the article
This article has been tagged as "too long" since February 2014 - it is now twice as long (in terms of bytes). The obvious thing is to split it up into one article per decade, e.g. List of earthquakes 2001-2010 and so on. When I started this article in its current form (it was "Recent earthquakes" starting in 2004) I chose to split the overall earthquake lists as: up to and including 1900, 1901-2000 and 2001 onwards. It has been suggested that I used a slightly archaic view (although one that I still hold) that centuries start on "1" and end on "100" and that we should perhaps shift to: up to 1899, 1900-1999 and 2000 onwards. I think that before splitting we should probably resolve that issue, so that we don't have to rework the split articles later. Mikenorton (talk) 21:00, 30 August 2018 (UTC)


 * In February 2014, the article was 146,317 bytes, it is now 340,265. Our guideline suggests that articles longer than 100,000 bytes should be considered for splitting. As there has been zero response to my earlier comment, I will split this article into two - List of earthquakes 2001–2010 and List of earthquakes 2011–2020. Mikenorton (talk) 11:31, 18 May 2019 (UTC)


 * The main list of earthquakes now exists as two articles, each covering a decade. They're probably still too long, but not quite as ridiculously so as this article was before the split. Mikenorton (talk) 20:46, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

Rename
Now that the detailed list of earthquakes has been moved to the two new articles, this article would be more accurately named as Lists of 21st-century earthquakes. Unless there are objections, I will do that in a few days time. Mikenorton (talk) 15:23, 30 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Well, it took me six months, but it's done. Mikenorton (talk) 10:22, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Death toll column in "Deadliest earthquakes by year"
The total deaths per year are completely unsourced. I intend to simply remove this column, unless someone comes up with a source. Mikenorton (talk) 10:22, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks User:Dwianto08 for adding a citation to Statista. I did my own compilation of figures for 2000, 2004, 2010, 2011 and 2015 using the NOAA earthquake database. In all cases the figures do not match with those given in the Statista source, The discrepancy for 2010 is understandable as there is a very large range of figures for the 2010 Haiti earthquake, but the difference for 2004 is more of a concern. Initial figures for the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake were 280,000, before the Indonesian authorities dropped the total of missing by more than 50,000, giving a final figure of 227,898, which is generally accepted. It would appear that Statista have not updated their figures. I can provide figures from the NOAA earthquakes database for each year - at least then we would know where they came from and we can add footnotes for things like the 2004 and 2010 totals. Mikenorton (talk) 17:16, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * 2000 - 224 (NOAA) 231 (Statista)
 * 2004 - 228,792 (NOAA) 298,101 (Statista)
 * 2010 - 319,319 (NOAA) 226,050 (Statista)
 * 2011 - 19,527 (NOAA) 21,942 (Statista)
 * 2015 - 8,778 (NOAA) 9,624 (Statista)

Looking further In both those cases the other three sources are very similar and totally different to Statista. Mikenorton (talk) 18:03, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * 2004 - 228,792 (NOAA), 228,802 (USGS), 228,808 (Wikipedia) compared to 298,101 (Statista)
 * 2010 - 319,319 (NOAA), 320,120 (USGS), 320,331 (Wikipedia) compared to 226,050 (Statista).

Color of the arrows for the death toll counts
On [|List of ongoing armed conflicts] the death tolls show a decrease in deaths as a green arrow where as a decrease in the death toll on this page shows as red. Which is correct? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Andrew.aussie.0407 (talk • contribs) 09:58, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

"List of earthquakes of Europe 2011-2015" listed at Redirects for discussion
The redirect [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_earthquakes_of_Europe_2011-2015&redirect=no List of earthquakes of Europe 2011-2015] has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached. —Lights and freedom (talk ~ contribs) 19:42, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

2002 Hindu Kush Earthquakes
Why is the fatality count different for the 2002 Hindu Kush Earthquakes in the deadliest earthquakes by year chart and the overall deadliest earthquakes chart. Should they be the same? Dead Iguana (talk) 18:07, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

Bold 2409:408A:1BB7:46CC:4093:B2E3:B9F7:1C5A (talk) 07:50, 7 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Both entries use 1,200 for fatalities for first of the 2002 Hindu Kush earthquakes. Are you perhaps looking at the yearly total in the second list? Mikenorton (talk) 08:55, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Okay, I see my mistake. What accounts for the difference between fatalities and total fatalities though? Dead Iguana (talk) 13:33, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
 * All the other earthquakes for that year - it's a yearly total for all earthquakes. Mikenorton (talk) 22:49, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Got it. Thanks for clearing up my confusion. Dead Iguana (talk) 23:13, 7 January 2024 (UTC)