Brazil has never been the center of news about earthquakes that shook the world. But some places in the country can suffer from earthquakes of great magnitude because of geological faults scattered throughout the national territory.
Recent studies indicate 48 geological faults in Brazil and many municipalities were built exactly in these places, according to the Institute of Geosciences da UFMG(Federal University of Minas Gerais).
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So, the earthquakes can be placed as a Brazilian reality, even if, until today, the records are less frequent.
Called geological faults or tectonic faults, they are ruptures in rocks that move horizontally and vertically, which generates instability.
In order to be able to measure the different magnitudes of earthquakes, the scholar Charles Richter created, in 1935, a scale that could quantify the energy released by an earthquake.
The scale, which was named after the scholar, starts at degree zero and can reach a much higher number, however, the record never reached degree 10 anywhere in the world.
Some countries, like U.S and Japan, have already faced several earthquakes of great magnitudes and the biggest problem is that it is very difficult to predict when the next earthquake will happen.
Most geological faults in Brazil are located in the Northeast and Southeast, in the cities described below:
In the Jaguaribe Valley, for example, some earthquakes of low magnitude have already been recorded, for example 3.1 and 3.4 degrees on the Richter scale.
Another example is the city of Porangatu, in Goiás, which had an earthquake of 3.7 on the Richter scale in 2022.
The city of Itacarambi has records of seven tectonic faults in its territory and already had a 4.9 earthquake in 2007.
The city of Tarauacá is the place with the most records of small earthquakes. She was very close to the biggest earthquake ever seen in Brazil, in 2022. The tremor reached 6.5 on the Richter scale.
The difference between Brazil and other countries is that our territory is located in the center of the tectonic plate South America, so the probability of intense tremors is lower, since the biggest earthquakes happen in the edges of the plates.
