A still image taken from a handout video provided by the Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences shows a flooded area in Severo-Kurilsk, Russia, 30 July 2025. Photo: EPA

One of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded struck off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East on Wednesday, flooding a coastal town and triggering tsunami warnings and evacuation orders across the Pacific.

According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the quake hit at 8:24am local time on Wednesday with a magnitude of 8.8, making it the most powerful earthquake since the 2011 Japan tsunami and the joint sixth strongest in recorded history.

The epicentre was located 119km east-southeast of the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, at a depth of 20.7km, USGS said.

The Russian Academy of Sciences said the earthquake was the strongest to hit the region since 1952. The initial quake was followed by around 30 aftershocks ranging in magnitude from 2 to 5, it added, with “significant and noticeable” tremors expected to continue for at least another month.

Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov described the quake as triggering the “strongest tremors in decades”, with waves as high as 3 to 4 metres reported along parts of the peninsula’s coastline. He added that a kindergarten had been damaged in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, where city authorities later declared a state of emergency.

A tsunami caused by the quake flooded the port town of Severo-Kurilsk on the Kuril Islands off the coast of Kamchatka, Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations said, with residents temporarily evacuated to higher ground.

Kamchatka Health Minister Oleg Melnikov told Russian state news agency TASS that several people had been injured while fleeing buildings, including one person who jumped out of a window and a woman who was wounded at the region’s newly built airport terminal, but that all were in a “satisfactory” condition.

Millions of people were urged to evacuate coastal areas in Japan, Hawaii and parts of the West Coast of the US, while tsunami warnings were issued in countries across the Pacific, including as far away as Ecuador and Peru.

Earlier in July, a series of smaller quakes struck around 115km east of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the largest of which reached magnitude 7.6. The Kamchatka Peninsula sits at the boundary between two tectonic plates, the Pacific Plate and the Okhotsk microplate, making the region highly vulnerable to seismic events.