M3.4 Earthquake near Almaty, Kazakhstan — 28 September 2026

Minor earthquakes in this range are felt by people close to the epicentre as a brief jolt or rattle, but they very rarely cause any damage.

A magnitude 3.4 earthquake radiates roughly 1.9 tons of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 178, which is below the USGS threshold of more than 600 for its significant-earthquake list. The ranking combines magnitude with available Did You Feel It responses and PAGER alert level; it is not a direct measurement of damage.

That is about 09:46 local solar time at the epicentre, during the morning.

This event was shallower than 100% of the 18 earthquakes recorded in Kazakhstan in our catalogue and stronger than 0% of them.

The epicentre was located at 43.2073, 76.9838 — 7 km southeast of Almaty. The closest other recorded event was a magnitude 4.5 earthquake 73 km east-northeast of here on 17 February 2026.

The nearest other settlements in our records are Turgen (73 km east-northeast), Chayek (189 km southwest), Naryn (197 km south-southwest) and Baetovo (238 km southwest).

At 10 km this was a shallow earthquake. Shallow events release their energy close to the surface, so for a given magnitude they produce noticeably stronger shaking — and more damage — than deeper ones. Roughly three quarters of all earthquakes worldwide occur at shallow depths.

This catalogue does not ingest eyewitness responses, so it cannot confirm where this earthquake was felt. Based on magnitude alone, an event this size may be noticed locally, especially close to the epicentre. Its shallow focus makes stronger surface shaking more likely than for a deeper event of the same magnitude.

The USGS record does not carry a link to NOAA tsunami information. That field is not an all-clear and does not state whether a tsunami occurred. In this case, a damaging tsunami would be less likely because at M3.4 it falls below the magnitude 6.5 threshold that generally applies before a submarine earthquake displaces enough water to generate a damaging tsunami; it occurred inland rather than beneath the sea floor. For an active coastal alert, use tsunami.gov or your local warning authority.

No further earthquakes have been recorded within about 150 km of the epicentre in the 9 hours since this event.

6 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above have been logged within roughly 200 km of this epicentre in our catalogue. The strongest was a magnitude 5.0 event near Chayek on 12 August 2026. This M3.4 event released about 251 times less energy than that event.

1 earthquakes have been recorded within 100 km of this epicentre in the past year, 0 of them in the past 30 days.

This earthquake is part of the September 2026 worldwide record, and of earthquakes in Kazakhstan during September 2026. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.