To gain some idea of the sheer strength of the Chile earthquake it helps to compare it with other notable ones. The Northridge earthquake that shook up much of Southern California in 1994 measured at 6.7; and the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 that leveled most of the city was a 7.7. The Haiti earthquake, which happened just several months before Chile was a 7.0. By all accounts, the 8.8 magnitude trembler under Chile was far and away one of strongest recorded. Ever.

On this day, February 27, in 2010, an earthquake that tied for the fifth largest of all-time, struck 200 miles off the coast of Santiago, Chile, 22 miles below the surface.

Earthquake magnitudes are measured on a base-10 scale: for every point in magnitude, the shaking force goes up tenfold. That means the Chile earthquake was ten times as strong as the one in San Francisco. And it was not even the strongest one measured in the country: fifty years before, a magnitude 9.5 earthquake struck Southern Chile, the largest-magnitude quake ever recorded.