Earthquakes in Oaxaca, Mexico: Live Map & the Guerrero Gap

Yes, Oaxaca is one of Mexico's highest earthquake-risk states. It sits directly above the stretch of Pacific coast where the Cocos plate subducts beneath the North American plate at one of the fastest rates anywhere along Mexico's coastline, making the state capital Oaxaca de Juárez, the coastal resorts of Puerto Escondido and Huatulco, and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec some of the most seismically active places in the country.

On 7 September 2017, a magnitude 8.2 earthquake — Mexico's strongest in a century — ruptured offshore near the Oaxaca-Chiapas border. It caused its worst destruction not on the coast itself but in Juchitán de Zaragoza, in Oaxaca's Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where dozens of people died and thousands of homes collapsed. Three years later, on 23 June 2020, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck near Crucecita, close to Huatulco, killing several people and shaking buildings as far away as Mexico City, more than 500 km distant.

Just west of Oaxaca lies the so-called Guerrero Gap, a stretch of the subduction zone between Acapulco and the Oaxaca coast that has not ruptured in a major earthquake since 1911, unlike neighbouring segments that have released their strain repeatedly since. Seismologists consider it capable of producing a very large earthquake, which is why Mexico's SASMEX early-warning network maintains dense sensor coverage along this coastline. Historical records point to earlier Oaxaca earthquakes of similar scale, including an estimated magnitude 8.6 event in 1787 that also triggered a large tsunami, underlining that today's hazard is part of a centuries-long pattern rather than a recent anomaly.