M5.2 Earthquake near Mejillones, Chile — 21 September 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 5.2 earthquake radiates roughly 951 tons of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 416, 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 07:00 local solar time at the epicentre, around dawn.

This event was shallower than 99% of the 733 earthquakes recorded in Chile in our catalogue and stronger than 96% of them.

The epicentre was located at -22.3643, -71.8678 — 167 km west-northwest of Mejillones. The closest other recorded event was a magnitude 4.3 earthquake 29 km east-northeast of here on 10 April 2025.

The nearest other settlements in our records are Mejillones (139 km southeast), Tocopilla (165 km east), Antofagasta (176 km southeast) and Puerto (177 km north).

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 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 M5.2 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 since this event was recorded.

26 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above have been logged within roughly 200 km of this epicentre in our catalogue. The strongest was a magnitude 5.6 event near Antofagasta on 10 November 2025. This M5.2 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 September 2026 worldwide record, and of earthquakes in Chile during September 2026. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.