On February 18th...
M7.4 - Tajikistan (Turkestan, Russia), 1911
Ninety people killed. A gigantic landslide blocked the Bartang River, destroying Usoy and several other villages in a sparsely-populated area, creating Sarez Lake (Sarez Kol, Sarezskoye Ozero). The landslide created a dam 4-5 kilometers thick and 703-788 meters (2,306-2,585 feet) high, with an estimated mass of 7-10 billion metric tonnes (about 7.7-11 billion short tons). This natural dam is roughly 10 times higher and about 1100 times the mass of the Madison Canyon Slide that created Earthquake Lake after the Hebgen Lake, Montana quake of August 18, 1959. That landslide created a dam up to 73 meters (240 feet) high and had an estimated mass of 73 million metric tonnes (80 million short tons).
From N.V. Kondorskaya and N.V. Shebalin, eds., New Catalog of Strong Earthquakes in the U.S.S.R. from Ancient Times through 1977, NOAA National Geophysical Data Center Report SE-31, Boulder, Colorado, 1982. (Update and English translation of Noviy Katalog Sil'nykh Zemlyetryaseniy na Territoriy SSSR s Drevneyshikh Vremyen do 1975 g., USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1977.); E. Christopherson, The Night the Mountain Fell, The Story of the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake, Earthquake Press, Missoula, Montana, 1962.; and O. Klotz, Earthquake of February 18, 1911, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 1915, 5, 4, p. 206-213.
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