Earthquakes in Brazil: Live Map & Low Seismic Hazard

Brazil occupies a vast region of the stable South American plate, far from any major tectonic plate boundary. Unlike Peru, Chile or Colombia along the Pacific coast, or Venezuela and the Caribbean islands to the north, Brazil experiences very little seismic activity. The country sits in the ancient, rigid interior of the continent where earthquakes are rare, small and generally pose minimal hazard to population and infrastructure.

São Paulo, Brazil's largest city and economic engine, has never experienced a significant damaging earthquake in recorded history. Rio de Janeiro, the second-largest city on the Atlantic coast, faces equally low seismic risk. Most of Brazil's rare earthquakes occur in the Amazon basin or deep in the subducting slab beneath Argentina and Paraguay, far from population centres. When small tremors are felt in Brazilian cities, they are almost always distant echoes from larger earthquakes elsewhere on the continent — Chile, Peru or Argentina.

Brazil's National Observatory (Observatório Nacional), part of the federal government, operates a sparse seismic monitoring network. Given the country's extremely low earthquake hazard, building codes do not impose seismic requirements the way countries in the Pacific Ring of Fire or Mediterranean belt do. For residents of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, earthquakes simply are not a principal natural disaster concern — flooding, landslides, drought and tropical storms pose far greater day-to-day risks.