M 4.5 in Japan on 18 May 2024 00:55 UTC

Event summary

This earthquake can have a low humanitarian impact based on the magnitude and the affected population and their vulnerability.

GDACS ID EQ 1429190
Earthquake Magnitude: 4.5M
Depth: 42.6 Km
Lat/Lon: 35.8064 , 140.7822
Event Date: 18 May 2024 00:55 UTC
18 May 2024 09:55 Local
Exposed Population:
3.5 million in MMI III
Inserted at: 18 May 2024 01:27 UTC
INFORM Coping capacity:
1.5 (Japan)

GDACS Score

For more info on GDACS alert score click here.
  Earthquake
(Rapid Impact)		 GDACS score
NEIC 0 0
us6000mzc0 Scaled population (vector) 0  
  C1 rapid impact 0  
  C2 rapid impact 0  
  Country Vulnerability 0  
  INFORM_normalised 0  
Maximum expected impact using different data sources.
Virtual OSOCC
Meteo assessment
Satellite products
Analytical products
Detailed event map. European Union, 2024. Map produced by EC-JRC.
The boundaries and the names shown on this map do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the European Union.

Updates on volcanic activity (Smithsonian)

Latest media headlines

Articles: 76 | About casualties: 2 | Last hour: 1

Moderate mag. 4.3 earthquake - 91 km east of Minami-Sōma, Fukushima, J ... 2024-05-21T23:03+0200.

Nearby places The closest larger town where the quake might have been felt is Minami-Sōma , a town with 59,000 inhabitants in Japan , in 91 km (57 mi) distance west of the epicenter. People likely experienced very weak shaking there. Severa
...(more)
Snow and rising sea levels may have triggered Japan's earthquake swarm2024-05-21T21:34+0200.

Snow may have weakened fractures and faults underground and contributed to earthquakes in Japan. Suzuki Kaku/Alamy. A years-long swarm of thousands of earthquakes in Japan was probably triggered by heavy snow and other environmental factor
...(more)
Improving the effectiveness of earthquake early warning systems2024-05-21T21:02+0200.

To deal with such situations promptly, the Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) system sends out notifications to areas expected to experience strong tremors by detecting primary seismic waves (P-waves) that arrive before the secondary waves (S-w
...(more)
Earth Snow and rising sea levels may have triggered Japan's earthquake ... 2024-05-21T17:06+0200.

Snow may have weakened fractures and faults underground and contributed to earthquakes in Japan. Suzuki Kaku/Alamy. A years-long swarm of thousands of earthquakes in Japan was probably triggered by heavy snow and other environmental factor
...(more)

View more news

Estimated casualties (PAGER)

USGS estimates the number of casualties for each earthquake for the Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response (PAGER) product.
The graph shows the current fatalities estimate.

Exposed population

Data, images, links, services and documents

For this events, GDACS has links to information from the following sources: EC-JRC (41), (3), NEIC (4), OCHA (1), INGV (1), WMO (1), INFORM (2), USGS (2),