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Home Tips > Useful > Earthquake An Earthquake Is A Trembling Or A Shaking Movement Of The Earth's Surface, Resulting From The Movement Of Faults, Quasi-planar Zones Of Deformation Within Its Uppermost Layers Most earthquakes are powered by the release of the stresses that accumulate over time, typically, at the boundaries of the plates that make up the Earth's lithosphere.
Earthquakes occur basically every day on Earth, but the majority of them are minor and cause no damage.
Most large earthquakes are accompanied by other, smaller ones, that can occur either before or after the principal quake. These are known as foreshocks or aftershocks, respectively. The power of an earthquake is distributed over a significant area, but in the case of large earthquakes, it can spread over the entire planet.
Earthquakes, especially those that occur beneath oceans or seas, can give rise to tsunamis, either as a direct result of the deformation of the sea bed due to the earthquake, or as a result of submarine landslips or "slides" indirectly triggered by it.
Earthquake effects are described in terms of intensity, a scale which attempts to quantify the severity of shaking at a given location. A number of intensity scales are in use, and there is a significant degree of consistency amongst them.
Large earthquakes can cause serious destruction and massive loss of life through a variety of agents of damage, including fault rupture, vibratory ground motion (i.e., shaking), inundation (e.g., tsunami, seiche, dam failure), various kinds of permanent ground failure (e.g. liquefaction, landslide), and fire or a release of hazardous materials. In a particular earthquake, any of these agents of damage can dominate, and historically each has caused major damage and great loss of life.
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