eli5: why is it impossible to get a magnitude 10 earthquake
In: 4021
It’s not impossible to get a magnitude 10 earthquake, it’s just that a magnitude 10 quake would be VERY powerful and it is, thankfully, VERY rare. We’re talking a 2000-mile fault line snapping and lurching 200 feet — BIG. In truth, there’s no faults that big that can do that (that we’re aware of). That’s getting close to the limit where a plate of the Earth’s crust just disintegrates, which probably can’t happen without some big rock from space slamming into the planet; the sort of thing that might kill millions of dinosaurs and most life on Earth.
There’s really no upper limit if you consider space rocks slamming into the Earth.
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