With a death toll of more than 50,000, the earthquake and its numerous aftershocks that have ravaged Turkey and Syria since February 6 are among the ten deadliest in the past 100 years.
An earthquake measuring 7.8 according to Chinese authorities (7.5 according to USGS) devastated the industrial city of Tangshan, 200 km east of Beijing.
The official death toll is 242,000 dead, but Western experts estimate up to 700,000 dead, making it the second deadliest in human history after Shaanxi (northern China) in 1556 with an estimated 830,000 deaths.
On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra (Indonesia) caused a gigantic tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people on the coasts of ten countries in Southeast Asia, including 170,000 in Indonesia.
The gigantic waves, partying at 700 km/h, reach a height of up to thirty meters.
On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7 earthquake in Haiti killed more than 200,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless. The quake turns the capital Port-au-Prince into a field of ruins.
As a result, the country was hit by a cholera epidemic from October 2010, brought by Nepalese peacekeepers who arrived after the earthquake. It will cause more than 10,000 deaths by January 2019.
On September 1, 1923, two minutes before noon, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck the Kanto Plain. The quake left more than 142,000 dead or missing and 100,000 injured, the most casualties from the fires that ravaged Tokyo and Yokohama for two days.
On October 5, 1948, at least 110,000 people died in a 7.3 magnitude earthquake in Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, then part of the USSR.
Saparmourat Niazov, a whimsical dictator who will rule the country from independence from 1990 to 2006, will establish a cult around the personality of his mother, who died in that earthquake.
On May 12, 2008, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake killed more than 87,000 people and injured 4.45 million, devastating large areas of Sichuan Province (southwest China). Among the victims are thousands of students who died when precariously built schools collapsed.
On October 8, 2005, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake killed more than 73,000 people and left 3.5 million homeless, mostly in the Pakistani-controlled area of Kashmir. The medical infrastructures are reduced to almost nothing.
On December 25, 1932, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck Gansu, northwest China, killing 70,000 people.
On May 31, 1970, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake near the north coast of Peru killed about 67,000 people. The town of Yungay, 450 km north of Lima, was swept off the map by a mudslide and ice, and the mountainous town of Huaraz was particularly hard hit.
On February 6, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook southern Turkey and neighboring Syria, followed by a very strong 7.5 magnitude aftershock.
More than 50,000 people (44,374 in Turkey) were killed, according to a report obtained by AFP from multiple sources at the end of February.