Chile has a lot of big earthquakes. The last was a M8.8 in 2010.
Was poking around a bit and came across this pie chart. Since the earthquake scale is logarithmic a M9.0 quake shakes 10 times as hard as a M8.0, and dissipates 30 times more energy.
This pie chart shows the sum total of all the energy dissipated in all earthquakes between 1906 and 2005 (note includes the 2004 Sumatra earthquake but not the 2011 Japan earthquake nor the 2010 Chile quake). It has the 3 huge >M9.0 quakes, but the smaller quakes are grouped and summed up by magnitude range.
What you see is the 1960 M9.5 Chile earthquake dissipated almost 25% of the total energy of all earthquakes for 100 years. That is huge. The 1906 San Francisco M7.9 Earthquake is the tiny slice of energy in the M7.0 - M8.0 range, so that was a relatively tiny amount of energy compared to the Chile, Alaska, and Sumatra quakes.
