Скачать или смотреть MALAYSIA 7.1 Earthquake - EVERYTHING About The STRONGEST Quake In Decades (FULL Coverage)

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The strongest earthquake recorded in Malaysia in over a century just struck 620 kilometres beneath the South China Sea — and the only reason it did not kill anyone is that 620 kilometres of solid Earth absorbed the energy before it reached the surface. On Monday, February 23rd, 2026, at 12:57 a.m. local time, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake ruptured within the subducting slab of the Philippine Sea plate beneath the Sulu Sea, 55 kilometres northwest of Kota Belud and less than 100 kilometres from the Sabah state capital Kota Kinabalu — a city of more than 500,000 people. The USGS confirmed a depth of 620 kilometres. MetMalaysia recorded it at 6.8. Either way, it is the largest earthquake instrumentally recorded near Malaysia since a magnitude 6.6 struck Lahad Datu in 1923, and the strongest to hit the country in living memory. Buildings across Sabah's west coast swayed for three to ten seconds after midnight. In Kota Kinabalu, residents in high-rise apartments felt their ceiling fans swing and furniture shift. Jalius Majin, 45, a resident of the People's Housing Project in Putatan, woke his wife and three children and rushed down the emergency staircase to the car park. In tourist hotspots across northern Borneo, holidaymakers who had been asleep in seafront hotels fled into the streets. Market vendors in central Kota Kinabalu described merchandise toppling from shelves. Authorities were flooded with calls asking one question: is a tsunami coming? The answer was no — and the physics explains why. A tsunami requires a shallow rupture that physically displaces the ocean floor. At 620 kilometres deep, the energy released is too far below the seabed to move the water column above it. The South China Sea stayed calm while the land beside it trembled. No structural damage. No injuries. No tsunami warning issued. But the collective memory of Sabah has not forgotten what a shallow earthquake can do. On June 5th, 2015, a magnitude 6.0 quake struck at shallow depth beneath the Crocker Range near Ranau — sending boulders cascading down the slopes of Mount Kinabalu and killing 18 climbers and guides, many of them students on school excursions. That earthquake was weaker in magnitude but catastrophically closer to the surface. Prof. Emeritus Dr. Felix Tongkul, geologist at Universiti Malaysia Sabah's Natural Disaster Research Centre, confirmed the 2026 event originated deep within the slab of ocean floor slowly subducting beneath northern Borneo — bending under extreme pressure until the stress becomes too great and the rock fractures. These deep intraslab events are rare beneath Borneo. Malaysia has recorded fewer than five earthquakes above magnitude 6 in its entire instrumental history. All of them hit Sabah. The question Sabah cannot answer tonight is not whether this earthquake caused damage — it did not. The question is what happens when the next one is shallow.
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