M4.5 earthquake near Kyzyl-Eshme, Kyrgyzstan

A magnitude 4.5 earthquake struck 99 km (62 mi) east-southeast of Kyzyl-Eshme, Kyrgyzstan on Tuesday, November 3, 2026 at 22:50 UTC, at a depth of 10 km (6 mi), according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Shallow quakes like this one shake the surface hardest. The nearest city of a million or more people is Dushanbe, about 406 km (252 mi) away.
Why here?
This earthquake struck about 532 km (331 mi) from the nearest major plate boundary, which makes it an intraplate earthquake. These happen on old faults inside a plate, where stress from the plate’s slow movement is released. They are less common, but can surprise areas that rarely feel quakes.
The red lines on the map are plate boundaries.
How strong was it?
Magnitude is logarithmic: each whole step releases about 32 times more energy. This magnitude 4.5 released roughly the energy of 85 tons of TNT. That is about 5.6 times the energy of a magnitude 4.0, a quake people nearby feel but that rarely causes damage. The strongest earthquake ever recorded, magnitude 9.5 in Chile in 1960, released about 32,000,000 times more than this one.
Aftershocks
In the first 2 hours after it, USGS recorded no smaller earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or more within 100 km (62 mi).
Outside the United States, USGS mainly lists quakes of about magnitude 4 and up, so smaller aftershocks there are undercounted.
Earthquake history here
Before this earthquake, USGS had recorded 61 earthquakes of magnitude 6 or larger within 300 km (186 mi) since 1900. The strongest:
- M7.7 · About 50 km NNE of Kashgar, Xinjiang, ChinaAugust 22, 1902
- M7.5 · 43 km ENE of Rasht, TajikistanJuly 10, 1949
- M7.3 · 134 km E of Kyzyl-Eshme, KyrgyzstanAugust 11, 1974
Official details, updates and the shaking map: USGS event page.
See every earthquake on November 3, 2026 or earthquakes by day.
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