A powerful 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula late Monday, triggering a tsunami that surged across the Pacific Ocean. Tsunami alerts stretched from Japan to South America, including portions of coastal Alaska and the West Coast, as well as Hawaii.

“This is certainly one of the biggest earthquakes we’ve seen recently,” said Andrew Newman, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. “It’s smaller than the 2011 Japan quake, but it's almost the exact same size as the Chile earthquake in 2010. It created a lot of local damage there as well as a large tsunami.”

The quake occurred along a megathrust fault, which is a type of subduction zone where one tectonic plate dives beneath another. These faults, common around the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” are responsible for the largest earthquakes in recorded history. They're also responsible for generating tsunami waves. 

"In these megathrust faults, one dives beneath another. It's actually that upper plate when it pops up," Newnan said. "It creates really large waves. That part that pops up may pop up as much as 10 to 15 or 20 feet, depending on how big the earthquake is. That's going to lift the entire water column around it...and then that wave just kind of propagates away."