Tsunami warnings have been issued around the Pacific Ocean after a magnitude-8.7 earthquake struck off the coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in the late morning local time on July 30.
The earthquake may be the eighth largest on record globally, seismologist Alice-Agnes Gabriel of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, wrote on Bluesky. It is likely the largest since the 2011 earthquake off the coast of Japan, which triggered a devastating tsunami that killed thousands and caused the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Evacuations have been ordered in Japan and Hawaii after the July 30 earthquake. The U.S. Tsunami Warning System has issued warnings for Hawaii and along the Aleutian Islands. Advisories have been issued for the rest of the Alaska coastline and the rest of the U.S. Pacific Coast. The first waves had begun to hit around 10 a.m. local time, several hours after the earthquake.
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The earthquake happened in a subduction zone at the Kuril-Kamchatka Arc, where the Pacific plate is being subducted under the Okhotsk plate. The epicenter is located 45 kilometers southeast of where a magnitude-9.0 temblor struck in 1952 and caused “a destructive, Pacific-wide tsunami,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
A magnitude-7.4 earthquake that struck in the same region on July 20, 2025, would be considered a foreshock to this July 30 quake, the USGS says.
