EARTHQUAKES ALL OVER THE PLANET! Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea - WHAT'S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW?

[00:00:00]Right now, as you're watching this, the ground has been shaking on opposite sides of the planet in the same week.

[00:00:05]And the sequence of events is genuinely remarkable. Yesterday morning, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake tore loose off the Pacific coast of Mexico, shaking buildings from Mexico City all the way to El Salvador and triggering a tsunami alert covering a 300 km stretch of coastline across two countries. Barely 24 hours before that, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, New Zealand issued a tsunami warning of its own after a strong earthquake struck near one of the most dangerous fault systems in the southern hemisphere, sending coastal residents scrambling in the dark of a winter night. Just days before that, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake ruptured the seafloor off Papua New Guinea at a depth of only 10 km. And today, as this video is being produced, the strongest earthquake anywhere on Earth in the past 24 hours struck the Solomon Islands.

[00:00:57]Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands. Four countries thousands of kilometers apart all rattled inside a single week. And all of it comes just weeks after Venezuela suffered the deadliest earthquake disaster in its modern history. and almost exactly 1 year after the strongest earthquake recorded anywhere on the planet in a decade struck off the coast of Russia. So today we are going to break down exactly what is going on, where it is most dangerous, whether these events are connected, and whether things could get even worse. No guessing, no dramatizing, just the facts, the science, and the real stakes.

[00:01:34]Before we get into it, drop a comment right now. Have you ever personally felt an earthquake? a small tremor, a moderate shake, or something that knocked things off your shelves and sent you running for a doorway. Tell me where you were and what it felt like because thousands of you watching this live in earthquake country from Mexico to the Philippines to California to New Zealand and I read those stories every single time. If you want to be the first to know every time something major happens geologically on this planet, subscribe to the channel right now. It is completely free. A thumbs up also helps enormously. Let us go for 5,000 likes on this one so the algorithm actually shows it to the people who need to see it.

[00:02:15]Thank you. Now, let us get into it. We start in Mexico because what happened there yesterday morning is the single largest earthquake to strike the region so far this year. And the story of why it did not become a mass casualty disaster is one of the most important stories in all of earthquake science. At 9:48 in the morning local time on Friday, July the 17th, 2026, the ground beneath the Pacific Ocean off the coast of the Mexican state of Chiapas gave way. The United States Geological Survey measured the earthquake at magnitude 7.3 with its epicenter located roughly 48 km southwest of the town of Aquilles Sardan near the far southern end of Mexico where the country meets Guatemala. The rupture occurred at a depth of approximately 15 km beneath the seafloor. That is shallow. And as we have covered on this channel many times, shallow is the word that should always make you pay attention. Because when an earthquake ruptures close to the surface, almost none of its energy gets absorbed by the rock above it. The shaking arrives at the surface with nearly full force. And the shaking from this one traveled. People felt it in Mexico City, more than 800 kilometers away from the epicenter. They felt it across Guatemala, where office workers and residents poured out of buildings and into the streets. They felt it in El Salvador, an entirely different country two borders away, where photographs showed people evacuating buildings in the capital of San Salvador. One single rupture on the seafloor, and three nations felt the ground move at the same time. In the city of Tapachula, which sits near the border between Mexico and Guatemala and close to the epicenter, residents described a pattern that anyone who has lived through a large subduction earthquake will recognize instantly. The shaking started gently.

[00:04:02]People assumed it would pass the way small tremors do in that part of the world all the time. And then it did not pass. It grew. One resident described being upstairs on the second floor of a home when the movement began, thinking it would fade and then feeling it intensify until the entire family went downstairs and evacuated into the street in an orderly rush. That slow build followed by escalating violence is the signature of a large earthquake arriving from offshore. The weaker but faster waves reach you first. The stronger, slower, more destructive waves arrive seconds later. If you ever feel shaking that starts small and keeps growing instead of fading, that is the ground telling you that something big has happened some distance away and that the worst of it is still on its way to you.

[00:04:47]Then came the water threat because this was not just any earthquake. This was a thrust earthquake on a subduction zone.

[00:04:54]And that specific combination is the exact recipe that produces tsunamis.

[00:04:59]Within minutes, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued an alert covering a radius of 300 kilometers around the epicenter, warning that hazardous waves of up to 1 meter above normal tide levels were possible along the Pacific coasts of both Mexico and Guatemala. The Chiapas Meteorological Service warned that waves of roughly 1 meter, about 3.3 ft, could reach parts of the coastline.

[00:05:23]Mexico's Navy told the public to stay away from beaches for at least 6 hours.

[00:05:28]And in coastal communities in Chiapas, people did not wait around to debate it.

[00:05:32]Reports from the region describe residents in low-lying coastal areas moving toward higher ground on their own initiative before any official told them to. That instinct, that cultural memory of what the ocean can do after the ground shakes is not paranoia. It is survival knowledge earned the hard way over generations on one of the most seismically violent coastlines on Earth.

[00:05:54]In the end, the ocean was merciful. This time, Guatemala observed small tsunami activity of less than 1 meter above tide level, and authorities assessed the overall threat as low. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center later confirmed the threat had passed. Water levels at some Mexican beaches were expected to rise by up to half a meter. Frightening, but not destructive. And here is the number that should genuinely stop you for a moment. a magnitude 7.3 earthquake shallow offshore near populated coastlines in three countries and the confirmed human toll as of the time this video was produced stands at zero deaths. Mexican President Claudia Shinbomb reported that preliminary assessments from Chiapas and the neighboring state of Tabasco showed no significant structural damage.

[00:06:41]Guatemala's President Bernardo Are confirmed that no one had been killed in his country. The Civil Protection Service in Chiapas reported at least four people injured. Four injuries from a magnitude 7.3. To understand how extraordinary that is, you need to understand what earthquakes of this size have done to this exact region before.

[00:07:01]And we are going to get to that history in a moment because it is the key to this entire story. But first, the ground was not done. The main shock was actually preceded by a smaller offshore tremor, a forerunner. And in the hours after the magnitude 7.3, the United States Geological Survey recorded at least five significant aftershocks ranging in magnitude from 5.1 all the way up to 6.0. Stop and think about that. A magnitude 6.0 earthquake, which on any normal day would be the headline event for an entire country, was in this case merely an aftershock, a footnote to something larger. And seismologists were clear that the sequence is far from over. After a main shock of this size, aftershocks can continue for days, weeks, even months. The largest aftershocks are most likely in the first hours and days, but significant ones can arrive much later when people have relaxed, when cracked buildings have been reoccupied, when everyone has decided the danger has passed. That is why structural inspections of buildings, bridges, and roads across coastal Chiapas and neighboring areas were expected to continue well beyond the first day. A building that survived the main shock with hidden damage can be finished off by an aftershock a fraction of its size. One meteorologist analyzing the event, Matthew Kapuchi, pointed out something else that most coverage skipped entirely because this was a thrust earthquake with one slab of the Earth's crust driving up and over another. The violent vertical motion did two things at once. It created the tsunami threat and it likely triggered a phenomenon called liquefaction in parts of the coastal landscape. Liqufaction is one of the strangest and most unsettling behaviors solid ground is capable of.

[00:08:43]When water saturated soil is shaken hard enough, the individual grains of sand and sediment momentarily lose contact with each other and the ground stops behaving like a solid and starts behaving like a thick liquid. Buildings can sink. Buried tanks and pipes can float upward and out of the earth. Cars can be swallowed to their windows in what was seconds earlier an ordinary street. The shaking passes, the soil stiffens again, and everything that sank or tilted during those seconds stays exactly where it ended up. Coastal river deltas and reclaimed land, exactly the kind of terrain found along the Chiapas coast, are the most vulnerable ground on Earth to this effect. So now, let us do what we always do on this channel. Let us go underneath the headline and explain the machine that produced this earthquake. Because once you understand it, everything else about this region, its history, its future, and its risk snaps into focus. Southern Mexico sits on top of one of the most active plate boundaries on the planet. Just offshore beneath the Pacific, a slab of ocean floor called the Kokos plate is being driven down beneath the North American plate, plunging into a deep ocean trench called the Middle America Trench, which runs along the coastline like a scar.

[00:09:55]The Koko's plate is dense, heavy, cold oceanic rock, and it is being forced under the lighter continental rock of Mexico at a rate of several centime.

[00:10:06]Several centimeters per year does not sound like much. It is roughly the speed at which your fingernails grow. But the plates do not slide smoothly. They lock.

[00:10:15]Friction pins the two slabs of rock together along the boundary where they meet. And while the surfaces are locked, the plates keep converging behind them.

[00:10:23]The rock bends. It compresses. It stores energy exactly the way a wooden board stores energy when you slowly bend it across your knee. And just like that board, there comes a moment when the rock cannot bend any further. It breaks.

[00:10:38]The locked boundary slips sometimes by several meters in a matter of seconds.

[00:10:42]And all the energy stored up over years or decades of slow motion releases at once. That release is the earthquake.

[00:10:49]Yesterday, one section of that boundary off Chiapas reached its breaking point and the result was a magnitude 7.3.

[00:10:56]This is why the region has the earthquake history it does. Chiapas alone has recorded at least 15 earthquakes above magnitude 7 since the year 1900. That averages out to roughly one major earthquake every 5 to 10 years, generation after generation, without end. The subduction machine never stops. It cannot stop. As long as the Pacific seafloor keeps spreading and the CCO's plate keeps diving beneath Mexico, the coastline of southern Mexico will keep experiencing great earthquakes on a schedule set entirely by geology and completely indifferent to anything happening in human affairs. And to really understand what yesterday could have been, you need to look at what this same machine did 9 years ago in one of the darkest months in modern Mexican history, September of the year 2017.

[00:11:46]On the seventh day of that month, late at night, the subduction system off Chiapas produced a colossal magnitude 8.2 earthquake, the strongest to strike Mexico in a century. It killed nearly 100 people, flattened tens of thousands of buildings across Chiapas and Wajaka, and caused an estimated $4 billion in damage. Entire town centers in the state of Waka were reduced to rubble in under a minute. And then 12 days later, while the country was still digging out, while aid convoys were still rolling south, a second completely separate earthquake struck. On September the 19th, a magnitude 7.1 ruptured much closer to the center of the country. And this one found Mexico City. Hundreds of people died. Dozens of buildings pancaked in the capital, including a school where children were trapped in the wreckage as rescue workers and volunteers dug with their bare hands on live television. two catastrophic earthquakes 12 days apart in the same country. That was 2017. And the date of that second earthquake, September the 19th, carries a weight in Mexico that almost no other date on the calendar can match. Because 32 years earlier, on the exact same day, September the 19th of 1985, Mexico City suffered the deadliest disaster in its modern history. A magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck off the Pacific coast.

[00:13:09]hundreds of kilometers from the capital.

[00:13:11]By every intuition, the city should have been too far away to suffer badly. It was not. And the reason it was not is one of the most important lessons in all of seismology. And it is the reason Mexico City remains uniquely vulnerable to this day. Mexico City is built on the bed of an ancient lake. Centuries ago, the valley floor was covered by a shallow body of water. And over time, the lake was drained and the city spread across the soft clay and sediment left behind. That lake bed sediment does something terrifying to seismic waves.

[00:13:43]When the waves arrive from a distant earthquake, the soft basin traps them and amplifies them the way the body of a guitar amplifies the vibration of a string. Seismic waves that would produce moderate shaking on solid rock can be magnified several times over inside the basin. And worse, the basin causes the shaking to resonate, to ring on and on, stretching seconds of ground motion into minutes. In 1985, that amplification effect turned a distant earthquake into an urban catastrophe. Somewhere on the order of 10,000 people died, with some estimates ranging far higher. Hundreds of buildings collapsed. The city's emergency systems were overwhelmed and ordinary citizens organized themselves into rescue brigades that dug survivors out of the rubble for days. 1985 broke Mexico's heart. But it also changed Mexico. And this is where the story turns because everything that happened yesterday, the zero deaths, the orderly evacuations, the people already moving to high ground before officials said a word, all of it traces directly back to the lessons written in blood in 1985.

[00:14:51]After that disaster, Mexico did three things that put it alongside Japan and Chile at the front rank of earthquake prepared nations on this planet. First, it rewrote its building codes, especially in the capital, requiring new structures to be engineered for the specific amplified longduration shaking that the lake bed produces. Second, it built something that at the time almost no other country on Earth had, a public earthquake early warning system.

[00:15:18]Mexico's seismic alert system, which began protecting Mexico City in the early 1990s, was the first of its kind in the world available to the general public. Sensors along the Pacific coast detect the fastmoving early waves of a subduction earthquake the moment it begins. And because those detection signals travel at the speed of light, while the destructive seismic waves travel through rock at only a few kilometers per second, the capital can receive up to 60 seconds or more of warning before the strong shaking arrives from the coast. 60 seconds.

[00:15:48]Loudspeakers mounted throughout the city blare the alert. Radio and television broadcast it automatically. People evacuate buildings, move away from windows, take cover, stop elevators, and brace, all before the ground has even begun to move beneath them. And third, Mexico drilled. Every year on September the 19th, the anniversary of both the 1985 and 2017 disasters, the entire country holds a national earthquake drill. Millions of people practice the evacuation at the same moment. School children, office workers, hospital staff. The response is rehearsed until it becomes reflex. So when the ground began to move yesterday morning, tens of millions of people across southern and central Mexico were not improvising.

[00:16:32]They were executing a procedure they had practiced their entire lives. Buildings constructed or retrofitted under modern codes, flexed and held. Coastal residents who felt long, strong shaking did exactly what generations of hard experience taught them and headed for high ground without waiting for permission. Emergency protocols activated within minutes. And a magnitude 7.3 earthquake, an event fully capable of killing thousands in an unprepared region, passed through three countries and left behind four reported injuries and zero confirmed deaths. We say this on this channel constantly, and yesterday, Mexico proved it again in real time. The size of an earthquake is decided by geology. The death toll is decided by human beings in the years and decades before the ground ever starts to shake. Venezuela showed the world the catastrophic version of that equation just weeks ago. Mexico yesterday showed the other side of it. But before anyone relaxes, there is one more piece of the Mexican puzzle that seismologists genuinely lose sleep over, and it is not Chiapas. Along the subduction zone, closer to the middle of Mexico's Pacific coast, there is a stretch of the plate boundary offshore of the state of Guerrero that has not produced a major earthquake in over a century. Scientists call it the Guerrero seismic gap. On either side of it, the boundary has ruptured repeatedly in large earthquakes, releasing its stored energy. But this segment, sitting closer to Mexico City than the Chiapas segment that broke yesterday, has stayed locked and quiet for far longer than the historical pattern suggests it should.

[00:18:07]Some of the accumulated strain there appears to bleed off through slow, silent slip events that release energy gradually without shaking. But how much strain those silent events actually relieve and how much remains stored in the locked rock is one of the most consequential open questions in North American seismology. If the Guerrero gap were to rupture end to end, the resulting earthquake could rival or exceed anything Mexico has experienced in the modern instrumental era, and it would strike closer to the amplifying basin of the capital than the great earthquakes of 1985 or 2017.

[00:18:43]Earlier this year, in January of 2026, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake in Guerrero killed two people, a sharp reminder that this section of the coast is very much alive. Yesterday's earthquake in Chiapas did not rupture the Guerrero gap, and the two segments are far enough apart that the direct effect of one on the other is minimal, but every large event along this subduction zone is a reminder that the machine is loaded all along its length, and that the quietest segment is very often the one storing the most. So that is Mexico. a giant earthquake, a tsunami alert spanning two countries, five major aftershocks, and a piece of national preparedness that turned a potential catastrophe into a story about resilience. But Mexico was only the beginning. Because one day, before the Chiapas earthquake on the far side of the Pacific Ocean in the middle of a cold southern hemisphere winter night, the same ring of fire that runs beneath Mexico reached the shores of New Zealand. And what happened there involves one of the most closely watched and most feared fault systems anywhere in the southern hemisphere. It was Thursday evening, July the 16th, at 14 minutes past 9 at night local time in the far southwest of New Zealand's South Island. This is Fjordland, one of the most remote and spectacular landscapes on Earth. A region of glacier cararved valleys, sheer granite walls, and deep dark sounds that draw visitors from every corner of the world. The small town of Tanao sits at the edge of it all, the gateway to Milford Sound. And on Thursday night, roughly 40 kilometers north of Tanao, beneath the upper reaches of Lake Tiana itself, the ground ruptured. The initial assessment from monitoring agencies put the earthquake at magnitude 6.3. Based on that number, New Zealand's National Emergency Management Agency did not hesitate. It issued a tsunami warning for the fjordland coast and urged people in coastal areas to evacuate. Understand what that means in practice. It is after 9 at night in the middle of winter in one of the most isolated corners of the country and the official instruction from the national government is to leave the coastline. Now in small settlements along that coast, people got up, got dressed, and moved in the dark. Inside Tayano, the shaking was strong enough to grab everyone's full attention. The duty manager at a local hotel described the building shaking for roughly a full minute. Think about how long a minute of continuous ground motion actually is.

[00:21:12]Count it out sometime. Another resident described the earthquake to a local newspaper as long and loud, saying it sounded like a train with the walls of the house visibly moving across the region from Queenstown to Milford Sound.

[00:21:25]And in fact, across the entire South Island and as far north as Auckland at the top of the North Island, people felt it. New Zealand's earthquake monitoring service, GeoNet, received more than 18,000 individual felt reports from the public for this single event. 18,000 people in a country of just over 5 million, taking the time to log what they had experienced. In the hours that followed, the picture sharpened.

[00:21:51]Scientists revised the magnitude downward from 6.3 to 5.9 and located the rupture at a depth of around 51 kilometers, considerably deeper than the shallow custal earthquakes that do the worst damage. The tsunami warning was downgraded to an advisory. And after two full hours passed with no tsunami signals detected on any coastal gauge, it was cancelled entirely. Though the emergency agency still warned that coastal areas could experience strong and unusual currents and unpredictable surges at the shore and told people to stay out of the water and away from harbors, marinas, and rivermouths. The Milford Road, the single spectacular highway that threads through the mountains to Milford Sound, was closed to inbound traffic overnight while engineers inspected it for rockfall and damage with reopening expected the following morning. And when the sun came up, the final accounting was almost miraculous given the location. No reported injuries, no reported structural damage. So why does this event matter so much if it ended with no damage and no casualties? Because of where it happened and because of what sleeps in the rock nearby. And this is the part of the New Zealand story that deserves your full attention.