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At least 188 people died and nearly 1,500 were injured June 24 after two devastating earthquakes hit a minute apart in northern Venezuela, the Caribbean nation with a long and deadly quake history.

The U.S. Geological Survey, using predictive modeling to estimate the death toll, said it would most likely run into the thousands, with a substantial probability of exceeding 10,000. A website set up to track missing people by leaders from the country's opposition said that about 24,000 people remain unaccounted for, Reuters reported.

The two quakes, with magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5, struck shortly after 6 p.m. local time. They were two of the strongest quakes to hit Venezuela in more than a century.

Quakes of 7.0 to 7.9 magnitude are considered major, capable of causing severe, widespread damage.

Venezuela is vulnerable to powerful quakes because it’s on the active tectonic boundary between the Caribbean Plate and the South American Plate. The two giant plates grind past each other, building stress across several major faults.

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France recorded its hottest day ever Tuesday as an early heat wave gripped Europe, prompting the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre museum to restrict visiting hours and disrupting school and transportation schedules in multiple countries.

Punishing temperatures extended to the United Kingdom and Spain, where weather agencies issued red alerts — like France — about the risks of extreme heat for tens of millions of people.

The record of 29.8 C (85.6 F) for France's national thermal indicator — an average of temperatures measured at 30 weather stations — was only the latest in a series of never-before-registered highs heaped on Europe's largest country. The conditions were likely to persist at least until the weekend.

"Further record-breaking temperatures are expected, including some that could surpass all previous records, regardless of the time of year," the Meteo France weather service said.

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Tectonic stress along Southern California’s San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems has reached — and in some areas exceeded — the highest levels seen in the past 1,000 years, according to new research led by Earth scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Researchers say the system is not showing signs of an imminent rupture, but is operating under unusually high stress in a long-term seismic cycle that could support large earthquakes, including multi-fault events.

The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, suggests the region is in a “critically loaded state,” with stress building across multiple fault segments. One key area of focus is Cajon Pass, a junction between the two fault systems that may act as an “earthquake gate,” either blocking ruptures from crossing between faults or allowing them to link into a single larger event.

Lead author Liliane Burkhard, a research affiliate at the University of Hawaiʻi’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetology and scientist at the University of Bern, said the system is highly stressed after more than 160 years since the last major rupture.

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El Nino, Nature’s chaotic climate agent, has formed in a warmed-up Pacific Ocean and is expected to grow to historic strength, meteorologists announced Thursday.

Experts said the El Nino, a natural warming cycle, should further heat a globe already warming from fossil fuel pollution and will likely turbocharge extreme weather across the planet. Meteorologists forecast it will rival — or exceed — a record El Nino that began in 1997 and helped trigger billions of dollars in damage from heat waves, floods, droughts, tornadoes and wildfires.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially confirmed the existence of the El Nino, which is a warming of the Pacific near the equator that affects weather patterns across the globe. NOAA’s announcement said there’s a 63% chance that the El Nino will get so intense this late fall and early winter that it “would rank among the largest El Nino events in the historical record going back to 1950.”

The warm, deep waters of an El Nino affect weather patterns by bringing “a lot of extra heat to the surface, fueling a lot of extreme events for a lot of places around the world,” said Clark University climate scientist Abby Frazier.

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Cuba experienced a shake on the afternoon of Monday, June 8, as a preliminary 6.1 magnitude earthquake hit off the Western coast of the island.

According to the United States Geological Survey, the earthquake was reported at around 1 p.m. ET. The 6.1-magnitude earthquake was reported at a depth of 6.2 miles with an epicenter about 65 miles northwest of Mantua, Cuba.

Spectrum News said that vibrations from Monday’s earthquake were felt by local reporters at a facility in St. Petersburg, Florida.

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A magnitude 7.8 earthquake centered at sea shook part of the southern Philippines early Monday, causing damage in a key coastal city, knocking down power and setting off 1-meter (3-foot) tsunami waves along nearby coasts, officials said.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. asked people to immediately go to higher ground in Philippine areas vulnerable to a tsunami, and Indonesian and Malaysian authorities also issued warnings to their nearby coastal areas.

There were no immediate reports of casualties, and it was not clear if people were trapped or injured in the collapse of at least one small building in General Santos, a tuna-processing city of more than 700,000 people that is also a commercial hub in the south.

The strongest earthquake to hit the Philippines this year was was centered at sea about 13 kilometers (8 miles) southwest of General Santos and was caused by movement in the Cotabato Trench at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), according to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology. It struck at 7:37 a.m., the institute's director, Teresito Bacolcol said.

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