A powerful earthquake struck southwestern Japan Tuesday afternoon local time, collapsing part of a shopping mall, toppling a stone wall at the centuries-old Kumamoto Castle, and sending more than 150,000 people to evacuation shelters, the BBC reported.

The quake, which the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) measured as a magnitude 6.8, hit at 4:27 p.m. local time near Kumamoto, a city of more than 700,000 people located on the island of Kyushu in southern Japan.

Thousands of homes lost power, and roads buckled across the region. The second floor of a shopping center collapsed, trapping shoppers inside, according to the BBC report; some of these people were evacuated and later hospitalized. A brief tsunami warning was issued and lifted within an hour.

The USGS measurement is different from the magnitude 7.1 reported by the Japan Meteorological Agency, "primarily because the agencies are reporting different magnitude types," the USGS reported. While Japan is looking at local magnitude, the USGS measured the moment magnitude, which is derived from the physical size of the fault rupture and gives the "most reliable estimate of earthquake size" for large earthquakes, since local-magnitude scales can lose accuracy once a rupture grows big enough, the USGS reported.

These measurements are helpful, as "different magnitude types capture different characteristics of earthquake source processes," the USGS noted. Local magnitude, for example, reflects how strongly the ground shook nearby, while moment magnitude reflects the total energy released across the fault.

Why this quake is scientifically interesting

Japan sits atop one of the most active plate boundaries on Earth, where the Philippine Sea Plate dives beneath the Eurasia Plate. That process, known as subduction, is responsible for the massive, tsunami-generating earthquakes that periodically strike offshore Japan, and it's been studied intensively for decades.

But Tuesday's earthquake didn't occur at the boundary itself. Instead, the rupture happened within the Eurasia Plate, more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) inland from where the plates meet, Jeffrey Park, a theoretical seismologist at Yale University, told Live Science. Roughly 90% of earthquakes happen at plate boundaries, where the constant grinding of two plates builds up stress until a fault gives way. Quakes that strike farther inside a plate — sometimes called intraplate earthquakes — are rarer and less understood, though scientists suspect that stress transmitted through the plate can reactivate old, dormant faults far from the boundary that produced it.

According to Park, the fault in Tuesday's earthquake moved in a way that suggests the plate tore horizontally as it was twisted by subduction occurring at an angle.

The USGS describes this event as shallow strike-slip faulting: the two sides of the fracture slid past each other horizontally, rather than one side thrusting up and over the other. This faulting style, combined with the shallow depth of just 6 miles (10 kilometers) down, points to the same type of rupture behind Kyushu’s deadly 2016 Kumamoto earthquake sequence.

That inland location is also why the quake didn't generate a damaging tsunami, despite the brief precautionary warning. Tsunamis are produced when a big event ‪—‬ such as an earthquake, volcanic eruption or landslide ‪—‬ displaces water; the force from that displacement then propagates as a wave.

Tuesday's rupture stayed entirely on land, so it never pushed the seafloor up the way offshore quakes do. That's why the tsunami risk stayed low, even with the brief precautionary warning. Still, an inland quake isn't automatically off the hook: if the shaking triggers a landslide that spills into the sea, that alone can generate a tsunami.

The depth mattered just as much as the location. The quake was shallow enough to concentrate its energy near the surface, which Park said explains the structural damage.

"Because it is shallow it will cause more structural damage than a similar-sized event that might occur deeper and offshore," he told Live Science in an email.

Earthquake country

Several earthquakes have already clustered in the area, and numerous aftershocks are expected over the coming days. Japan experiences roughly 1,500 earthquakes annually, making it one of the most seismically active countries on the planet — a byproduct of sitting at the junction of several tectonic plates.

To protect itself, Japan has spent decades — and learned from painful lessons from disasters like the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami — engineering a response system built for exactly this scenario.

Bullet trains are programmed to halt automatically the instant seismic sensors detect a major earthquake, a safeguard Park pointed to as a defining feature of the country's earthquake readiness. That automatic shutdown extends to other transit and utility systems, part of a broader early-warning network that alerts the public within seconds of a quake's detection, giving people crucial time to take cover before shaking arrives.

Japan's investment in its infrastructure may help to explain why, even after a magnitude 7 event near a city of 700,000, Japan's death toll and damage have historically been far lower than those from comparable quakes elsewhere in the world.

Search-and-rescue efforts are continuing in Kumamoto, with CNN reporting that between 20 and 30 employees remained unaccounted for at the Aeon Mall in Kashima Town, where the building’s second floor had collapsed. Firefighters were also working to reach the site and contain nearby fires.

A pod of killer whales has sunk another yacht off northwestern Spain, reinforcing a bizarre pattern of vessel encounters that has stretched on for more than six years along the Iberian coast.

In the incident, reported Friday (July 24), the whales destroyed the rudder of a 46-foot-long (14 meters) Swedish-flagged yacht off Galicia in northwestern Spain, forcing the two people aboard to send a mayday call. A Spanish coastguard vessel towed them to safety, Spain-based news outlet Sur in English reported.

The incident came after several other encounters in the same waters earlier that week, including one in which a pleasure craft called the Idem sank near Estaca de Bares, the northernmost point of the Iberian Peninsula. The ship sank after the killer whales, also known as orcas (Orcinus orca), destroyed its rudder. Both occupants were rescued.

That makes the Idem at least the eighth boat lost to these encounters since they began, according to groups that track the incidents. More than 700 interactions between orcas and vessels have been logged since 2020, ranging from a brief nudge to a multihour rudder-ramming session, according to the Atlantic Orca Working Group, the Spanish-Portuguese research collective that has coordinated data collection on the phenomenon from the start.

Researchers have identified roughly 15 individual killer whales involved in these incidents, out of an Iberian subpopulation of fewer than 50. The group is so small that the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists it as critically endangered, as it is dependent mainly on Atlantic bluefin tuna for its food.

The family-like cluster is thought to be led by a female known as White Gladis. That name comes from an early theory researchers themselves once floated: that White Gladis suffered some kind of traumatic run-in with a boat and that the encounter flipped a behavioral switch, with her being the first in the group to start ramming rudders.

Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist with the Atlantic Orca Working Group, told Live Science in 2023 that this kind of defensive, trauma-driven origin was gaining traction among researchers at the time. But "defensive" isn't "vengeful" — and the idea has since curdled online into a punchier revenge story most scientists studying the population don't endorse.

So why do orcas go after the boats? Nobody knows for certain, but the leading explanation is simple: Orcas are some of the most social animals on the planet, and social animals pick up habits from one another the way trends spread through a friend group. Researchers describe the behavior as socially learned — young orcas appear to watch adults ram a rudder and then try it themselves, and the habit has spread through the group over time.

A 2022 study in the journal Marine Mammal Science found that the killer whales usually targeted sailing boats and often lost interest after striking the rudder and causing the boat to stop.

None of that makes the encounters any less disruptive for the people living through them. The standard guidance from authorities like the Maritime Safety and Rescue Society and the Atlantic Orca Working Group, refined over repeated encounters, is to cut the engine, drop the sails if possible, disengage the autopilot, and let go of the wheel entirely, giving the orcas nothing to push against. Boats that follow this protocol tend to sustain less damage than those that don’t.

Sailors are asked to report every encounter. Each one adds to the data scientists are using to try to solve a years-long mystery.

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Cut marks suggestive of cannibalism have been discovered on the fossils of an ancient human relative in a cave in Spain, new research finds. But many of the bones from the species, known as Homo antecessor, were from adults ‪—‬ not just children, as previous discoveries had found ‪— adding a new dimension to the cannibalism that was practiced in this area 850,000 years ago.

The two dozen bones and teeth were recently found in Gran Dolina cave, part of the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological complex in northern Spain, according to a July 24 translated statement from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES). Among the remains were fragments of a skull, spine, arm and leg bones, as well as three teeth from several members of the now-extinct H. antecessor, a relative of modern humans that lived in Europe between about 1.2 million and 770,000 years ago. Several of the bone fragments had cut marks from stone tools.

Over the past few decades, researchers have identified numerous cases of cannibalism at Gran Dolina, meaning H. antecessor is the oldest known human relative to eat its own group members for nutritional reasons. In a 2010 study, researchers noted that most of the evidence of cannibalism at Gran Dolina came from the bones of infants and juveniles, who would have been easier to capture and kill as the young, defenseless members of a rival group. But the newly excavated fossils have upended that assumption.

"The discovery of more adult individuals, some of whom also bear cut marks, demonstrates that cannibalism was not restricted to younger individuals," Palmira Saladié, a biological anthropologist at the IPHES who coordinated the work, said in the statement.

The number of individuals found at Gran Dolina has now risen to at least 13, and about half of them are adults. "The increase in the number of individuals, and especially the addition of more adults, allows us to begin understanding this population from a much more complete perspective than ever before," Andreu Ollé, an archaeologist at the IPHES, said in the statement.

Excavation at Gran Dolina has also brought to light an assemblage of stone tools made from flint, quartzite and sandstone, along with animal bones from hyenas, beavers, deer, horses and rhinoceroses, according to the statement.

Evidence of cannibalism at the site is extensive. Stone tools found in the cave are consistent with the cut marks on the human bones, and the animal bones have revealed butchering techniques that were also used on humans. Some of the human bones also had human bite marks, Saladié told Live Science in 2025, which is the "most reliable evidence that the bodies found at the site were indeed consumed."

But while the practice of cannibalism at Gran Dolina has been confirmed, the reason for it is still unclear. Researchers hope the newly discovered adult bones may help them better understand the practice among H. antecessor groups.

"We have only just begun excavating this new area" at Gran Dolina, Marina Mosquera, an archaeologist at the IPHES, said in the statement, "and the first results already demonstrate its enormous scientific potential."

Further analyses on the bones are now underway to explore questions about age-related differences in cannibalism, the number and length of cannibalistic episodes, and the social organization of H. antecessor, according to the statement.

What do you know about early humans? Test your knowledge with our human origins quiz!

The ancient Egyptians sometimes reused crafted materials. This block, which features a battle scene, was likely created during the reign of Amenhotep II between 1427 and 1400 B.C., during the 18th dynasty. But when it was discovered, the block was being used as part of the foundation of the unfinished mortuary temple of Ramesses IV (who ruled from 1153 to 1147 B.C., during the 20th dynasty).

The painted sandstone slab was discovered in Luxor in 1912 by Egyptologist Herbert E. Winlock, who later became the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has the block in its collection. In his original publication describing the artifact, Winlock wrote that it featured a scene of an Egyptian pharaoh slaying his enemies with a bow and arrow. "The block may be taken as one of the best preserved specimens of the great imperial pictorial-relief yet discovered," he wrote.

The excellent preservation of the artifact and its vibrant colors was likely due to its reuse in Ramesses IV's temple foundations, Catharine Roehrig, the Met's curator emerita of Egyptian art, wrote in a 2008 explanation of the relief fragment.

Measuring roughly 24 by 45 inches (61 by 115 centimeters), the painted sandstone carving was likely part of a larger scene depicting an Egyptian pharaoh vanquishing an enemy army, according to Roehrig. The pharaoh's chariot and horses appear in the upper-right corner, while a rival soldier tries to avoid being trampled to death. Three of the enemies have been pierced by arrows.

The pointed beards and distinctive clothing suggest the enemies were ancient Syrians or possibly the Hyksos, a Semitic-speaking foreign dynasty that ruled Egypt from around 1640 to 1530 B.C., during the Second Intermediate Period, James P. Allen, former curator of Egyptian art at the Met, wrote in 2005. The battle scene may therefore reflect historical conflicts fought between dynasty 18 pharaohs like Amenhotep II and Asiatic rulers.

But the relief was unlikely to have been created as a commemoration of a specific historical battle. "Their primary purpose was to portray the pharaoh in his role as the victorious defender of Egypt," Roehrig wrote.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?