The sequence
At 4.35am on 4 September 2010 the Greendale fault let go a magnitude 7.2 and Canterbury has been counting ever since, 3,657 earthquakes of magnitude 3 or more in GeoNet’s catalogue, from the February morning that took the city to the shakes still arriving. This is the whole record, drawn the way the instruments wrote it down.
Month by month, the decay
Earthquakes of magnitude 3+ per month, New Zealand time. The tallest bar is the month the sequence opened; the spikes after it are February 2011, the June and December doublets, and the tail is still arriving, the most recent a M3.0 on 28 June 2026.
Where the shakes were
One tick per shake, the fainter the smaller. The line running west is the Greendale fault that opened the sequence; the clusters east are the Port Hills and offshore faults that answered in February and after. Drawn live on the map’s shakes layer.
The big ones
Year by year
The suburbs the catalogue points at
Epicentres GeoNet placed inside each suburb’s mapped outline, where the instruments put the break, not a measure of the shaking the suburb felt. Shakes that fell outside every outline: offshore, on the plains west, in the gaps between boundaries, aren’t counted here; every suburb page carries its own count.
Questions, answered briefly
GeoNet’s catalogue holds 3,657 earthquakes of magnitude 3 or more inside the region since the 4 September 2010 mainshock, 39 of them magnitude 5 or bigger. Below magnitude 3 the count runs to tens of thousands; this page draws the line where people could generally feel it.
The opener: magnitude 7.2 on 4 September 2010, on the Greendale fault 25 km south of Oxford, the Darfield earthquake. The deadliest came five months later: magnitude 6.2 on 22 February 2011, 5 km south-east of Christchurch.
Yes, the sequence is still running. Aftershock sequences decay but do not stop on a schedule, and the catalogue still records magnitude-3 shakes most months. The monthly chart on this page is the decay, drawn as the instruments wrote it.
GeoNet’s earthquake catalogue via its public event service, every magnitude-3-or-bigger event in the region box, kept verbatim: each row’s magnitude is GeoNet’s own (Mw, ML or MLv), and its place label is GeoNet’s too. The live feed of recent shakes is at /quakes; what the ground did with the shaking is at /liquefaction.
Also in the earthquakes
- Earthquakes, livethe ones that just landed
- The faultsthe traces under the plains
- Liquefactionthe ground that moved
- The land gradesTC1, TC2, TC3
- The red zonethe land the Crown wrote off
- The rebuild’s receiptsSCIRT’s photograph archive
- The earthquakes, explainedwhat happened and why
- Liquefaction, explainedwhy the east failed
- The rebuild, explainedthe machinery that put it back
The record behind this
GeoNet’s earthquake catalogue, pulled whole from its public event service, every event of magnitude 3 or more in the region since the mainshock, kept verbatim: each magnitude is GeoNet’s own (Mw, ML or MLv), each place label GeoNet’s. Below magnitude 3 the catalogue runs to tens of thousands more; the line sits where people could generally feel it. What the shaking did to the ground is at /liquefaction; the recent shakes as they land are at /quakes.
This page as markdown: /sequence.md · the catalogue as data: /quakes-sequence.json · the sequence in plain language: the earthquakes explainer · the fault it opened on: /faults · the ground it cost: /redzone · the ground it graded: /technical-categories · why the east bore it: the liquefaction explainer · a point on the map: /before.