M5.5 earthquake near Hasaki, Japan

A magnitude 5.5 earthquake struck 74 km (46 mi) northeast of Hasaki, Japan on Saturday, November 7, 2026 at 11:07 UTC, at a depth of 32 km (20 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 Tokyo, about 162 km (101 mi) away.
USGS’s PAGER impact estimate is GREEN: little or no damage expected.
24 people reported feeling it to USGS “Did You Feel It?”.
Why here?
This earthquake struck about 104 km (65 mi) from the boundary between the North American and Pacific plates. Most earthquakes happen along plate boundaries like this one, where the pieces of Earth’s outer shell collide, pull apart or grind past each other. Stress builds up over years until the rock suddenly slips.
The red lines on the map are plate boundaries.
What kind of fault?
USGS’s analysis of the seismic waves shows it was a thrust (reverse) earthquake: one block of crust was pushed up and over another, as happens where plates collide.
Shaking and impact
The strongest shaking USGS estimates was intensity 4 on the Modified Mercalli scale: light. USGS’s PAGER system estimates it most likely caused no deaths (90 percent probability). Early estimates are revised as reports come in.
How strong was it?
Magnitude is logarithmic: each whole step releases about 32 times more energy. This magnitude 5.5 released roughly the energy of 3 kilotons of TNT. That is about 178 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 1,000,000 times more than this one.
Aftershocks
In the first 9 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 332 earthquakes of magnitude 6 or larger within 300 km (186 mi) since 1900. The strongest:
- M9.1 · 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake, JapanMarch 11, 2011
- M8.0 · 5 km SSE of ?iso, JapanSeptember 1, 1923
- M7.9 · 174 km SE of Katsuura, JapanNovember 25, 1953
Official details, updates and the shaking map: USGS event page.
See every earthquake on November 7, 2026 or earthquakes by day.
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