POPULAR MECHANICS - On July 30, 2025, at 11:24 a.m. local time, a massive magnitude 8.8 megathrust earthquake rattled the eastern coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. It was the largest seismic event since the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011, although thankfully it was much less deadly. The massive quake happened along the Kuril–Kamchatka subduction zone—a fault boundary between the Okhotsk plate and the Pacific plate on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, a 25,000-mile stretch of seafloor that produces three-quarters of the world’s earthquakes. Most accounts of the 2025 quake reported only moderate damage and minimal tsunamis in coastal regions across the Pacific, though one small valley did record a 109-foot wave. While Japan is still recovering from the fallout of the Tōhoku earthquake even now, the world mostly forgot about the Kamchatka earthquake in less than a week.
But while its historical legacy might be short-lived, its scientific one may be just beginning. In a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, two University of California Riverside (UCR) geophysicists, Axel Periollat and Gareth Funning, used the Kamchatka earthquake to test a model that attempts to predict the precise location where major seismic events will strike.