eli5: why is it impossible to get a magnitude 10 earthquake
In: 4021
Not enough potential energy in Earths crust to release that much in one quake. But quakes can happen on other bodies in space. Largest quake ever recorded was magnitude 32 on a neutron star. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(natural_phenomenon)#Starquake
The magnitude scale is logarithmic.
A magnitude 9 quake releases as much energy as 475 megatons of TNT.
A magnitude 10 quake releases as much energy as 15,000 megatons of TNT.
A magnitude 10 has never been seen before, scientist think/hope there isn’t enough energy stored up in the crust to do something that bad.
But the scale keeps going up like that, it’s just that the energies involved stop being stuff we see on planets.
Randall Munroe noted that in Star Wars, the Death Star caused a magnitude 15 earthquake on Alderaan.
But while stuff like the Earth doesn’t go that high, stuff like Neutron Stars are extreme enough to crank that scale up.
A Neutron star has a crust that’s so dense that a single cubic centimeter of the stuff is literally 1 billion tons, and they occasionally under go star quakes.
A [neutron star 50,000 lightyears away](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGR_1806%E2%88%9220) had a magnitude 35 quake. It blasted out so much gamma rays it blinded scientific equipment and managed to actually have a measurable effect on the atmosphere of Earth.
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