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A 8.8-magnitude earthquake shook the remote, sparsely populated Kamchatka region and set off tsunami waves. No serious injuries were reported, officials said.
July 30, 2025, 11:31 a.m. ET
It was the worst earthquake to hit Russia’s Far East in decades, unleashing huge waves in the Pacific Ocean and setting off tsunami warnings across the world.
The quake had a magnitude of 8.8 and powerful aftershocks that rattled local residents. But the damage reported across the sparsely populated Kamchatka Peninsula and in the Kuril Islands nearby was relatively minor.
Some of the tsunami waves that the earthquake generated were as high as 19 feet, the RIA Novosti news agency said, citing Russia’s state Institute of Oceanology.
A local port was flooded and ceiling panels fell at a terminal building of a regional airport, injuring one woman, the regional emergency authority said.
The local health ministry told Interfax, a Russian news agency, that some people were injured but that there were “no serious traumas.”
Medical workers at a cancer center in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the regional capital, were operating when the earthquake hit, Oleg S. Melnikov, a local health care official, said. They scrambled to keep their patient safe as the operating theater’s walls shook, he said.
