Japan’s Noto Peninsula is reeling from its most powerful earthquake in a century, but the death toll is remarkably low.
The 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck the peninsula in central Japan on January 1, violently rattling buildings, triggering landslides, starting fires, and even forcing land upward to create new beaches on the coast.
Such quakes can be incomprehensibly deadly. When a pair of tremors of similar magnitude hit Turkey and Syria last year, the disaster resulted in at least 56,000 deaths. In 2010 in Haiti, a 7.0 earthquake and its aftershocks killed up to 300,000 people. In 2005, a 7.6 quake killed at least 79,000 in Pakistan.
As of Friday, however, the death toll from Japan’s latest temblor was 94 people, Reuters reported.
