This is an automated archive.

The original was posted on /r/askscience by /u/oceankelp on 2023-09-29 00:13:18+00:00.

Growing up, I always heard that the northern hemisphere produced more earthquakes (on average) that the southern hemisphere. I am unsure if this is true, but my high school environmental science teacher said this was due to the northern hemisphere containing a majority of the Pacific Ring of Fire.

However, I was messing around with the USGS this morning and noticed that a lot of higher magnitude earthquakes occurred in the southern hemisphere. I exported the data and found that 2122 earthquakes out of the 3576 earthquakes that occurred from January 1st, 2000 and August 29th, 2023 came from latitudes less than 0. That comes out to roughly 59.34% of earthquakes with a magnitude greater than or equal to 6 occurring in the southern hemisphere.

Why is this? What is it about the southern hemisphere that causes it to have nearly 10% more magnitude 6+ earthquakes (especially when some of the strongest earthquakes occurred in the northern hemisphere)?

Just to add on: this is the google sheets link with a better look at the data.