This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

On March 27, 1964, a huge earthquake struck the Prince William Sound off the coast of Alaska.

Out in the Gulf of Alaska, the ocean bottom plunges, then heaves upward a full 50 feet,

and a wave starts racing for shore.

The quake is the second most powerful ever recorded

at 9.2 on the Richter scale,

and it killed more than 100 people.

And just like the devastating Sumatra quake of 2004

or the Chilean quake in 2010,

the Great Alaska earthquake struck right around the time of the full moon.

Coincidence?

In 2016, Japanese researchers concluded that large earthquakes might indeed be more likely to occur

during times of significant tidal stress.

That's when it's either a new or full moon.

And the news rumbled through the media,

despite the study's small sample size,

of just a dozen large quakes. Now seismologist Susan Huff of the US

Geological Survey has done a much larger analysis. She plotted more than 200 big

quakes, magnitude 8 or above, over the past four centuries, looking to see if they were

any more likely to strike on certain days of the year or during key phases of the moon.

The answer, neatly summed up in the study Seismological Research Letters.

...