M7.5 Earthquake near 2025 Southern Drake Passage Earthquake — 22 August 2025

Major earthquakes cause serious damage across wide regions and are capable of destroying buildings that were not designed for seismic loading. Events at this size frequently trigger long aftershock sequences lasting months.

A magnitude 7.5 earthquake radiates roughly 2.7 million tons of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 868, which meets 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 22:09 local solar time at the epicentre, late at night.

The epicentre was located at -60.1859, -61.8206. The closest other recorded event was a magnitude 4.7 earthquake 7 km south of here on 11 October 2025.

At 11 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 produce strong, widely felt shaking. Its shallow focus makes stronger surface shaking more likely than for a deeper event of the same magnitude.

The USGS event record links to NOAA tsunami information because this was a large event in an oceanic region. That link flag does not mean a tsunami occurred or that a warning is active. Check tsunami.gov and instructions from your local authority for the current status of your coastline.

5 further earthquakes have been recorded within about 150 km of the epicentre in the seven days after this event, the largest of them magnitude 5.1.

36 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above have been logged within roughly 200 km of this epicentre in our catalogue. The strongest was a magnitude 8.0 event near Drake Passage on 22 August 2025. This M7.5 event released about 5.6 times less energy than that event.

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

This earthquake is part of the August 2025 worldwide record. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.