Are earthquakes in South America common?

Question

Which area are they most common

Answer 1

the largest earthquake of all time, hit in the southern portion of the country. On May 22, 1960, 19:11:14 UTC, a 9.5 earthquake struck 180 feet below the bottom of the sea and 100 miles off the Chilean coast near Valdivia.

Thanks to earlier alerts, there was not a large loss of life in Chile, but the resulting tsunamis caused damage along the Chilean and Peruvian coasts and spread across the entire Pacific Ocean to Hawaii, the Philippines, and Japan, with waves measuring up to 25 meters high. When the tsunami hit Onagawa, Japan almost 22 hours after the quake, a tide guage recorded a wave height of 10 feet above high tide. See Valdivia and the Catastrophe for details.

Some people regard earthquakes as occasional events, but over one million earthquakes happen every year. Some are so slight they are unfelt, others last for minutes that seem like forever and can cause major changes in the landscape. Others are huge catastrophic events that cause massive destruction and loss of life while forever changing the area and the people who lived there.

There are two major regions worldwide of earthquake, or terremoto, activity. One is the circum-Pacific belt which encircles the Pacific Ocean, affecting the West coasts of North America and South America, Japan, and the Phillipines. It includes the Ring of Fire along the Northern edges of the Pacific. The other is the Alpide belt which slices through Europe and Asia. It is along this line that the Christmas Sumatra earthquake occurred.

Earthquakes along these belts occur when two tectonic plates, far under the surface of the earth, collide, spread apart or slide past each other. This can happen very slowly, or quickly. Thee result of this faster activity is a sudden release of a tremendous release of energy that changes into wave movement. These waves roll through the earth’s crust, causing earth movement. As a result, mountains rise, ground falls or opens. Buildings near this activity can collapse, bridges can snap under the pressure and people can die.