Bolivia Earthquake, Bolivia, 1994

The 1994 Bolivia earthquake occurred on June 9, 1994. The epicenter was located in a sparsely populated region in the Amazon jungle, about 200 miles from La Paz. The Harvard CMT Project assigned it a focal depth of 647 km and a magnitude Mw of 8.2, making it, at the time, the largest earthquake since the 1977 Sumba earthquake, later superseded by more recent larger events (e.g., 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake). It is also the second largest earthquake ever recorded with a focal depth greater than 300 km, along with the 2018 Fiji earthquake, the largest currently being the 2013 Okhotsk Sea earthquake. South America also experienced the then second and third largest earthquakes at focal depths greater than 300 km: Colombia, 1970; and northern Peru, 1922.