M5.1 Earthquake near South Sandwich Islands region — 20 June 2026

Moderate earthquakes can damage poorly built or unreinforced structures near the epicentre, while well-engineered buildings typically escape serious harm. Shaking is often strong enough to wake sleeping residents over a wide area.

A magnitude 5.1 earthquake radiates roughly 674 tons of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 400, 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 03:02 local solar time at the epicentre, in the early hours of the morning.

The epicentre was located at -57.9998, -25.4839. The closest other recorded event was a magnitude 5.0 earthquake 7 km north-northeast of here on 31 January 2026.

At 60 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 can be felt widely and may cause minor local damage. 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 M5.1 it falls below the magnitude 6.5 threshold that generally applies before a submarine earthquake displaces enough water to generate a damaging tsunami. 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.

102 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above have been logged within roughly 200 km of this epicentre in our catalogue. The strongest was a magnitude 6.2 event near South Sandwich Islands region on 01 January 2025. This M5.1 event released about 45 times less energy than that event.

24 earthquakes have been recorded within 100 km of this epicentre in the past year, 2 of them in the past 30 days.

This earthquake is part of the June 2026 worldwide record. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.