M4.4 Earthquake near Töma Township, China — 17 December 2024

Light earthquakes are widely felt near the epicentre and can rattle windows, dishes and hanging objects. Damage is uncommon and usually limited to cracked plaster or fallen loose items.

A magnitude 4.4 earthquake radiates roughly 60 tons of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 298, 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 23:38 local solar time at the epicentre, late at night.

This event was shallower than 99% of the 280 earthquakes recorded in China in our catalogue and stronger than 21% of them.

The epicentre was located at 33.6926, 92.9426 — 259 km north-northeast of Nagqu. The closest other recorded event was a magnitude 4.1 earthquake 103 km north of here on 09 May 2025.

The nearest other settlement in our records is Nagqu (198 km south).

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 is often felt across the surrounding area. 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 M4.4 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 seven days after this event.

4 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above have been logged within roughly 200 km of this epicentre in our catalogue. The strongest was a magnitude 4.8 event near Nagqu on 02 December 2025. This M4.4 event released about 4.0 times less energy than that event.

No other earthquakes have been recorded within 100 km of this epicentre in the past year, which makes this a genuinely isolated event.

This earthquake is part of the December 2024 worldwide record, and of earthquakes in China during December 2024. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.