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Rather than searching on "earthquake," we decided to get more specific and started our search by typing "biggest earthquake" into the Yahoo! search box. It worked perfectly -- the search results provided an answer faster than you can duck for cover. We glanced at the sites and quickly noticed the first one ended with the domain ".gov," which means it's an official government site. Once we arrived at the site, we realized we were at the National Earthquake Information Center's FAQs. The site provided the answer... sort of. We learned the biggest earthquake since
1900 recorded with modern equipment occurred on May 22, 1960, in Chile and measured 9.5 on the Richter scale. More than 2,000 people were killed, 3,000 injured, and 2,000,000 left homeless. The temblor caused $550 million in damage, and the destruction didn't end there -- the earthquake also caused a tsunami that resulted in 61 deaths and $75 million damage in Hawaii; 138 deaths and $50 million damage in Japan; 32 deaths in the Philippines; and $500,000 in damage to the west coast of the United States. As always, we checked our work at a few other sites, including the Institute of Geological & Nuclear Sciences of New Zealand and the Geophysics
Program at the University of Washington. Every site we checked corroborated the first site's information. Okay, we now know about the biggest quake in the world, but what about the biggest quake to hit the United States? Well, it was a 9.2 rocker that hit Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 28, 1964. The destruction was massive, but, luckily, only 125 lives were lost as a result of the earthquake (15) and ensuing tsunami (110).
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