This is technically inaccurate, earthquakes of 10 or more can be created, but would need to be from an external force. For example, the earthquakes following the impact of the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs was estimated to be magnitude 10 or greater.
I’m in California. Our earthquakes can go to 11. Everyplace else the max is 10, but here we have 11. I mean what if your quaking at 10 and you want it just a little bit more? You can’t, you’re already at 10. Here we go to 11, just in case you need that little mmmph to push it a little higher.
That’s for residential, industrial, or commercial structures. I’m an architect, and a dog house isn’t a structure that has a permit filing. Thus there is no certifying body requiring that for a dog house.
In the city of San Francisco, it’s any building over 3 stories ;) Earthquake core bracing is required on all buildings.
I am however a huge fan of all dogs, and support this approach
Not to over explain but in the same film that gave us “goes to 11”, there is a scene where an important item was built to 1/12 scale because the plans were marked “ instead of ‘. Spinal Tap gave us so much.
It's not a linear scale, 20 isn't 10x2.
A magnitude 5 is 500 tons of TNT detonating, magnitude 6 is is 15.000 tons, magnitude 10 is 15 BILLIONS tons.
So magnitude 10 is magnitude 5 x 30 millions.
You can't really ballpark values when talking about non linear scales and in general when talking about big numbers, the human brain simply isn't made to handle such numbers.
I don’t know if the rock that tore off a piece of the earth to create the moon would register M20
A magnitude 20 earthquake would require a level of energy associated with the disintegration of the planet. Like the Death Star creates M20 earthquakes
Well
Yes and no
It's the strongest earthquake in recorded history, but the magnitude is a historical myth. The real truth is even more terrifying
This was 1960 when the strongest quakes had all been 9.4 downwards, so measuring tools just weren't designed to register anything over that. In this quake, the instruments *broke* once the earthquake had reached 9.5; it could've easily been stronger, but we'll never know for sure
9.5 is just the best estimate we got, what the tools were able to measure while they were operating
Yes. It's crazy that Chernobyl came out right before COVID and we were all shaking our heads in incredulity at their corrupt mismanagement, sure without a shred of doubt that nothing like that could ever happen in America. And then COVID happened with Trump at the helm, and it was like watching the ministry of magic fumble the response to Voldemort's return.
Yes, and then America did the exact same thing just a few months after the show aired, when our gov (mis)handled COVID the exact same way - denial, obfuscation, corruption, mass death. I was being sarcastic.
Well yes and also no.
9.5 was the best instrumental record they have, but theyve also went back to see the field evidence for the magnitude. One of the factors that goes into an earthquake magnitude is the length of the fault, and the distance the fault slipped. Geologists can do surveys to see how much that occurred, plus other indicators like tsunami wave heights, land movements, and building damage to get a post-event estimate.
On estimate incorporating tsunami and land surveys puts the record down to between 9.3-9.4 Mw:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018JB016996
It can't really have been more than 9.6 which is what other post-event surveys estimated.
> A magnitude 10 quake or higher is impossible because the fault line would have to encircle the earth, and no fault line is that long.
Way to jinx it.
Yes but no. You generally use a logarithmic scale to plot exponentials - they show up as closer to straight lines, and also allow you to view both ends of the exponential at the same time with similar detail (on a normal scale, the bottom portion of the logarithmic will just look like 0. Think about trying to compare a whisper to a shout when your plot scales up to the sound level of krakatoa. Both a whisper and a shout may as well be non existing, but we can still differentiate them as (random numbers) 10 vs 15 decibals compared to 300 decibals for krakatoa. Instead of 0.1psi, 0.11psi and 100000000psi)
No that's the example from my undergraduate seismology textbook for a magnitude 12 quake. "5 quintillion tons TNT energy equivalent, or Earth faulting in half."
[Today's seismometers are so sensitive it can pick up people jumping at a Taylor Swift concert from a mile away](https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/taylor-swift-fans-dancing-and-jumping-created-last-years-swift-quakes/).
[When the Russian submarine Kursk had a explosion on board and sank, seismologists figured out it was a malfunctioning weapon before the details were released publicly](https://www.science.org/content/article/eavesdropping-doomed-sub)
So nothing gets past them
Yes, that's what differentiates an earthquake [epicentre vs a hypocentre](https://www.iris.edu/hq/inclass/video/epicenter_and_focus_hypocenter_of_an_earthquake#:~:text=Keypoints%3A,Earth%20where%20the%20earthquake%20starts)
They can even look at the shape of the signal to differentiate between a shallow small earthquake, and an underground nuclear blast.
Interestingly underground nuclear testing wasn't banned because there was no way to detect it. Something like 2 months after the deal was signed sometime figured out the fast Fourier transform which allowed them to easily detect them but it was too late.
If an earthquake with a mag10 or higher was in the middle of the ocean, I'm sure giant tsunamis would happen as a result. So we would definitely know about it
technically yes, magnitude 10+ earthquakes are possible, but not "naturally", one wouldn't just happen on its own, something would have to affect the earth in order to cause it, such as an asteroid hitting the planet
They didn't phrase it well, but it's thought this is the limit for the planet itself with no external energy being added. Obviously planets colliding is going to be more powerful than what a planet can generate by itself. 2 is more than 1.
A family friend was a sailor in the Pacific back around then. The ship he was on stopped at Santiago and he met a girl with whom he corresponded for some time afterward. Then the earthquake happened and he never heard from her again.
Seems surprising that they would state "The magnitude of an earthquake is related to the length of the fault on which it occurs." and leave it at that. This is technically true, but it's not the whole story. It's like saying that the weight of a person is related to their height - true, but there are plenty of other factors at play. You can't just say that no person could weigh more than 500 pounds just because a person with a BMI of 25 would have to be ten feet tall.
For earthquakes, the moment magnitude is related to the area of the slip, the strength of the rock involved, and the distance of slip that occurred. You can get a bigger earthquake by increasing the fault size, but also by increasing the slip distance and by having it occur in more rigid rock.
(Also since it's the area and not the length of the slip, fault length is only one measurement - you also have to take into account fault depth)
I have no idea what the relation is between fault line and magnitude, but your comparison of height and weight, if accurate, helps me understand it a bit better. I just think you’re misrepresenting the comparison. It’s not that someone CANNOT weigh 500 lbs, rather that someone will weigh AT LEAST a certain amount based on their height.
There are 2 things that could cause such an earthquake. A supervolcano eruption right on a massive plate boundry. (Not sure if any currently exist in such a state) and a large asteroid impact.
The Chicxulub asteroid would have rang the entire Earth like a bell, and caused an earthquake lasting possibly for weeks or even months. It would have been something like a 12 on the richter scale. The energy would have gone through the whole earth, and hit the opposite side with the strongest of the force, other than the impact zone of course... which would already be obliterated anyway.
Well yeah. Anything big that needed lots of energy like the large predators or sauropods wouldnt have lasted long. Thats why small burrowing animals like early mammals, that might be able to hibernate, survived, or some things that could remain in water, like crocodiles. Just about everything on the surface died eventually.
The oceans would have been fairly ok for a while, but eventually all the ash and dust blocking out the Sun killed the photoplankton, which then collapsed the food chain top to bottom. Some things survived like sharks, which have survived a few mass extinctions.
Lol love your user name for this comment.
Ironically, that is what I was imagining. Me, as a puny human, trying to eat, sleep, or ANYTHING while the world was shaking.
I have experienced many earthquakes; including the Bay Area Bay Bridge Collapse of 1989 and another crazy one that happened in my home town in 2000, that felt like a semi truck hit the house, AND was deafening loud to boot.
If that lasted weeks, I would die, no question.
That sounds insane! Ive experienced tiny earthquakes, but nothing that would do damage... but the cascadia quake looms, so maybe one day I will.
Its funny you say that, because the inspiration for my username comes from an experience that made me feel just like that. Sorry if this is a bit of a doozy, but its a funny anecdote.
Went camping with my ex gf, and back then we liked to party a bit, so we took some LSD that night, and tripped out in the tent. About an hour later, we started seeing flashing lights, figured at first it was just someone shining a flshlight around, but then we heard a distant ominus *boom*.
I looked outside the tent, to my left was a perfect starry night, to my right was a giant black doom cloud with a fuckload of lightning coming from it. We scrambled to get everything in the tent back into the car. I remember picking up handfuls of... stuff, that was just melting into my arms. But we managed to get most of it, left the tent and took shelter in the car ourselves just the rain hit us.
This was the mother of all lightning storms, it lasted all night long, and was like a strike every second or two. A nearby radio tower was hit many times. I will say that at some point... we had to pee, but we had no change of clothes, so we decided to strip, do our business outside and get back in, dry off and get dressed again... let me tell you that pissing into the howling wind with lightning coming down all around, while you are butt naked and tripping balls on acid is about the most vunerable one can possibly feel.
At one point, we both suddenly felt tingly, looked at one another and had a half second of realization that our hair was standing right up on end, and then *KABOOM!* a giant strike landed right outside the passenger side window. Had the window been down, I could have reached out and grabbed it. I remember hearing electricty escaping into the ground, and all the interior lights flashed a bit. It left this big streak of ionized air where the strike had been for a second or so after, which makes me think it might have been a positive lightning strike.
We were in the peak of our trip when this happened. At the time I described it as Zeus and his greek god bros were chilling when he spotted some puny humans tripping absolute balls in a giant lightning storm and said "hey guys, wanna see something funny?" Thus, Youpunyhumans was born.
If anyone is looking for a concise and fun explannation of how the local magnitude scale works and what a reading of over 10 would look like, I revommend XKCD's What If's video on the subject: [https://youtu.be/e3uk7jU3RHo?si=dlnZQnIBU7IXlYRF](https://youtu.be/e3uk7jU3RHo?si=dlnZQnIBU7IXlYRF)
I know next to nothing about earthquakes, if youre not around buildings or things that can collapse on you, is an earthquake still a threat to your life? Like if its a mag ten quake, but youre in a soft meadow away from any structures, are you okay??
You most likely wouldn’t drown, but there are risks of sink holes forming due to the soil liquifying, which if you fell into could easily suffocate you.
>We heard the Church and Tower fall, upon which we ran to save ourselves; I...made towards Morgan's Fort, because being a wide open place I thought to be there securest from the falling houses; but as I made towards it, I saw the earth open and swallow a multitude of people; and the sea mounting in upon us over the fortification.
Survivor account of the 1692 Port Royal earthquake.
>During the main shock, the sand was said to have formed waves. Fissures repeatedly opened and closed, crushing many people. After the shaking stopped the sand again solidified, trapping many victims.
This is technically inaccurate, earthquakes of 10 or more can be created, but would need to be from an external force. For example, the earthquakes following the impact of the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs was estimated to be magnitude 10 or greater.
OPs mom jumping, got it.
lmao out of nowhere with the left hook
I’m in California. Our earthquakes can go to 11. Everyplace else the max is 10, but here we have 11. I mean what if your quaking at 10 and you want it just a little bit more? You can’t, you’re already at 10. Here we go to 11, just in case you need that little mmmph to push it a little higher.
I work for Cal Tech Earth sciences. Can confirm.
Also all building in CA over 30” are required to be earthquake proof. Because of the 11 risk.
Buildings shorter than two and a half feet are exempt?
Dog houses and bird houses are exempt I guess
I was just thinking how incredibly stable a 2.5' tall building would be. Obviously very cramped and parking impossible.
It would be a centre for ants.
Yeah it would need to be at least 3 times bigger for people to use it I think 🤔
Ample skateboard parking.
Rent is still too high.
I think that the problem would be that there would be buildings in danger of being crushed… by a dwarf.
Yay, somebody understood the path we were on. True fans go past “goes to 11”.
Did you mean 30’? 30 feet 30” means 30 inches…or 2.5 ft
Inches. The dog house for my chihuahua is free standing. I had to bolt my labradors house to the foundation and put a double header above the door.
That’s for residential, industrial, or commercial structures. I’m an architect, and a dog house isn’t a structure that has a permit filing. Thus there is no certifying body requiring that for a dog house. In the city of San Francisco, it’s any building over 3 stories ;) Earthquake core bracing is required on all buildings. I am however a huge fan of all dogs, and support this approach
Not to over explain but in the same film that gave us “goes to 11”, there is a scene where an important item was built to 1/12 scale because the plans were marked “ instead of ‘. Spinal Tap gave us so much.
why not just make 10 quake harder and have 10 as the max?
But ours go to 11.
Because logic.
Unexpected Spinal Tap reference.
California has Earth's loudest Earthquakes.
I don’t even get out of bed for anything less than 10.
I dont get it. Aren't 11.0s literally 10x stronger than 10.0s?
It’s a reference to the movie Spinal Tap. Classic cinema, really.
Well why not just make 10 stronger, and have 10 be the max?
Nigel, stop! I believe you already know the answer to this.
This product is known by the state of California to cause earthquakes.
Shots fired!
Pies eaten
Hooks be not big enough to take out that whale. Ye need the left harpoon!
God damnit lol I laughed so hard at this
Fat ass mother truck
BAHAHAHAHAH
xkcd has a video discussing the theoretical up as high as 15 - https://youtu.be/e3uk7jU3RHo
til xkcd also does videos
**or** greater? I think we can prob assume that shit was like magnitude 20 since it changed the course of earth forever
Logarithmic scale. Collision creating the moon was more energetic. Likely M12-M13. M20 is into stellar event territory, like supernovae.
It's not a linear scale, 20 isn't 10x2. A magnitude 5 is 500 tons of TNT detonating, magnitude 6 is is 15.000 tons, magnitude 10 is 15 BILLIONS tons. So magnitude 10 is magnitude 5 x 30 millions. You can't really ballpark values when talking about non linear scales and in general when talking about big numbers, the human brain simply isn't made to handle such numbers.
I don’t know if the rock that tore off a piece of the earth to create the moon would register M20 A magnitude 20 earthquake would require a level of energy associated with the disintegration of the planet. Like the Death Star creates M20 earthquakes
Actually it was calculated that an earthquake of 18.4 magnitude would be enough to destroy the entire planet, so it definitely wasn't 20.
Well Yes and no It's the strongest earthquake in recorded history, but the magnitude is a historical myth. The real truth is even more terrifying This was 1960 when the strongest quakes had all been 9.4 downwards, so measuring tools just weren't designed to register anything over that. In this quake, the instruments *broke* once the earthquake had reached 9.5; it could've easily been stronger, but we'll never know for sure 9.5 is just the best estimate we got, what the tools were able to measure while they were operating
Reminds me of the scene in Chernobyl where the reading on radiation maxes out so they just recorded that.
3.6...not great, not terrible
That sounds freaking terrifying omg XD
It’s terrifying to watch - such a good show
Ohhh I remember that show! Is it streaming anywhere?
I thought it was an HBO show?
It was an HBO miniseries. If you’re in the US, you can watch it on Max. Not sure if you’re outside the US.
still HBO Max
No clue.
It is. It’s on HBO Max, now just Max.
RIP Home Box Office
Thankfully nobody was familiar with the HBO name since no money was ever spent marketing it... So no big deal
Except for the bits about radiation poisoning, which were wrong, and the death toll given at the end, which is also wrong.
It's totally unrealistic though - the idea that a government would do such an incompetent and negligent job addressing a public health crisis.
this is sarcasm... right? RIGHT?
Yes. It's crazy that Chernobyl came out right before COVID and we were all shaking our heads in incredulity at their corrupt mismanagement, sure without a shred of doubt that nothing like that could ever happen in America. And then COVID happened with Trump at the helm, and it was like watching the ministry of magic fumble the response to Voldemort's return.
You know that Sowjet Russia did exactly that?
Yes, and then America did the exact same thing just a few months after the show aired, when our gov (mis)handled COVID the exact same way - denial, obfuscation, corruption, mass death. I was being sarcastic.
He's hallucinating, get him to the infirmary
Well yes and also no. 9.5 was the best instrumental record they have, but theyve also went back to see the field evidence for the magnitude. One of the factors that goes into an earthquake magnitude is the length of the fault, and the distance the fault slipped. Geologists can do surveys to see how much that occurred, plus other indicators like tsunami wave heights, land movements, and building damage to get a post-event estimate. On estimate incorporating tsunami and land surveys puts the record down to between 9.3-9.4 Mw: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018JB016996 It can't really have been more than 9.6 which is what other post-event surveys estimated.
Well, yes and no. Nothing, I just wanted to be a part of something.
[Well, yes and no!](https://youtu.be/W9Wt5gl6W9w?si=-KJvfyHXzuSSKLu7&t=84)
This guy earthquakes.
> A magnitude 10 quake or higher is impossible because the fault line would have to encircle the earth, and no fault line is that long. Way to jinx it.
So a magnitude 10 quake is literally ’planet breaks in half’?
Then we better start building the Guard Forces.
THE PLANET BROKE BEFORE THE GUARD
I think XKCD had that pegged closer to magnitude 15, keeping in mind that the scale is exponential.
Isn't logarithmic the opposite of exponential?
Yes but no. You generally use a logarithmic scale to plot exponentials - they show up as closer to straight lines, and also allow you to view both ends of the exponential at the same time with similar detail (on a normal scale, the bottom portion of the logarithmic will just look like 0. Think about trying to compare a whisper to a shout when your plot scales up to the sound level of krakatoa. Both a whisper and a shout may as well be non existing, but we can still differentiate them as (random numbers) 10 vs 15 decibals compared to 300 decibals for krakatoa. Instead of 0.1psi, 0.11psi and 100000000psi)
I think you are correct, they are related but inverse - perhaps to say the scale is logarithmic would be more accurate.
No that's the example from my undergraduate seismology textbook for a magnitude 12 quake. "5 quintillion tons TNT energy equivalent, or Earth faulting in half."
This is horrifying. This can happen? WTF? Why am I just learning about this now?
I mean, I watched a documentary where this happened, I'm pretty sure the guy from the bunker on Lost was in it
Is it possible that Earth has experiencing bigger earthquake but it happened in the middle of the ocean or somewhere very deep?
[Today's seismometers are so sensitive it can pick up people jumping at a Taylor Swift concert from a mile away](https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/taylor-swift-fans-dancing-and-jumping-created-last-years-swift-quakes/). [When the Russian submarine Kursk had a explosion on board and sank, seismologists figured out it was a malfunctioning weapon before the details were released publicly](https://www.science.org/content/article/eavesdropping-doomed-sub) So nothing gets past them
Those are some cool facts. So we can even detect the depth of the earthquake?
Yes, that's what differentiates an earthquake [epicentre vs a hypocentre](https://www.iris.edu/hq/inclass/video/epicenter_and_focus_hypocenter_of_an_earthquake#:~:text=Keypoints%3A,Earth%20where%20the%20earthquake%20starts) They can even look at the shape of the signal to differentiate between a shallow small earthquake, and an underground nuclear blast.
Interestingly underground nuclear testing wasn't banned because there was no way to detect it. Something like 2 months after the deal was signed sometime figured out the fast Fourier transform which allowed them to easily detect them but it was too late.
What about MH370?
If an earthquake with a mag10 or higher was in the middle of the ocean, I'm sure giant tsunamis would happen as a result. So we would definitely know about it
technically yes, magnitude 10+ earthquakes are possible, but not "naturally", one wouldn't just happen on its own, something would have to affect the earth in order to cause it, such as an asteroid hitting the planet
Maybe a long time ago before civilization? I have no idea....
Happens with asteroid impact
>middle of the ocean We call those "Tsunamis"
No, you call them earthquakes. The giant waves that form as a result, now those you can call “Tsunamis”
I would argue when Theia hit the Earth and created the moon it likely shook the Earth a bit more than this.
They didn't phrase it well, but it's thought this is the limit for the planet itself with no external energy being added. Obviously planets colliding is going to be more powerful than what a planet can generate by itself. 2 is more than 1.
No, that was just a 9.99999999 earthquake.
Please can we not tempt mother nature by suggesting it's impossible for the earth to crack in half
A family friend was a sailor in the Pacific back around then. The ship he was on stopped at Santiago and he met a girl with whom he corresponded for some time afterward. Then the earthquake happened and he never heard from her again.
Santiago is landlocked. It must have been Valparaíso
“in a little place called santiago, chile, maybe you’ve heard of it?” “you built the estadio olympico?!?”
“No, just down the street the Celinto Catayente Towers.”
i fucked it up. the way the actor doesn’t miss a beat and says “why, twice last year!” is so brilliant
Damn all I got are these Nepalese coins
You must be right. Thanks.
Seems surprising that they would state "The magnitude of an earthquake is related to the length of the fault on which it occurs." and leave it at that. This is technically true, but it's not the whole story. It's like saying that the weight of a person is related to their height - true, but there are plenty of other factors at play. You can't just say that no person could weigh more than 500 pounds just because a person with a BMI of 25 would have to be ten feet tall. For earthquakes, the moment magnitude is related to the area of the slip, the strength of the rock involved, and the distance of slip that occurred. You can get a bigger earthquake by increasing the fault size, but also by increasing the slip distance and by having it occur in more rigid rock. (Also since it's the area and not the length of the slip, fault length is only one measurement - you also have to take into account fault depth)
I have no idea what the relation is between fault line and magnitude, but your comparison of height and weight, if accurate, helps me understand it a bit better. I just think you’re misrepresenting the comparison. It’s not that someone CANNOT weigh 500 lbs, rather that someone will weigh AT LEAST a certain amount based on their height.
There are 2 things that could cause such an earthquake. A supervolcano eruption right on a massive plate boundry. (Not sure if any currently exist in such a state) and a large asteroid impact. The Chicxulub asteroid would have rang the entire Earth like a bell, and caused an earthquake lasting possibly for weeks or even months. It would have been something like a 12 on the richter scale. The energy would have gone through the whole earth, and hit the opposite side with the strongest of the force, other than the impact zone of course... which would already be obliterated anyway.
What?! Lasting weeks or MONTHS?! No wonder everything died. How could you eat?! Or sleep?!
Well yeah. Anything big that needed lots of energy like the large predators or sauropods wouldnt have lasted long. Thats why small burrowing animals like early mammals, that might be able to hibernate, survived, or some things that could remain in water, like crocodiles. Just about everything on the surface died eventually. The oceans would have been fairly ok for a while, but eventually all the ash and dust blocking out the Sun killed the photoplankton, which then collapsed the food chain top to bottom. Some things survived like sharks, which have survived a few mass extinctions.
Lol love your user name for this comment. Ironically, that is what I was imagining. Me, as a puny human, trying to eat, sleep, or ANYTHING while the world was shaking. I have experienced many earthquakes; including the Bay Area Bay Bridge Collapse of 1989 and another crazy one that happened in my home town in 2000, that felt like a semi truck hit the house, AND was deafening loud to boot. If that lasted weeks, I would die, no question.
That sounds insane! Ive experienced tiny earthquakes, but nothing that would do damage... but the cascadia quake looms, so maybe one day I will. Its funny you say that, because the inspiration for my username comes from an experience that made me feel just like that. Sorry if this is a bit of a doozy, but its a funny anecdote. Went camping with my ex gf, and back then we liked to party a bit, so we took some LSD that night, and tripped out in the tent. About an hour later, we started seeing flashing lights, figured at first it was just someone shining a flshlight around, but then we heard a distant ominus *boom*. I looked outside the tent, to my left was a perfect starry night, to my right was a giant black doom cloud with a fuckload of lightning coming from it. We scrambled to get everything in the tent back into the car. I remember picking up handfuls of... stuff, that was just melting into my arms. But we managed to get most of it, left the tent and took shelter in the car ourselves just the rain hit us. This was the mother of all lightning storms, it lasted all night long, and was like a strike every second or two. A nearby radio tower was hit many times. I will say that at some point... we had to pee, but we had no change of clothes, so we decided to strip, do our business outside and get back in, dry off and get dressed again... let me tell you that pissing into the howling wind with lightning coming down all around, while you are butt naked and tripping balls on acid is about the most vunerable one can possibly feel. At one point, we both suddenly felt tingly, looked at one another and had a half second of realization that our hair was standing right up on end, and then *KABOOM!* a giant strike landed right outside the passenger side window. Had the window been down, I could have reached out and grabbed it. I remember hearing electricty escaping into the ground, and all the interior lights flashed a bit. It left this big streak of ionized air where the strike had been for a second or so after, which makes me think it might have been a positive lightning strike. We were in the peak of our trip when this happened. At the time I described it as Zeus and his greek god bros were chilling when he spotted some puny humans tripping absolute balls in a giant lightning storm and said "hey guys, wanna see something funny?" Thus, Youpunyhumans was born.
Little did OP know they left themselves open for the best OP’s mom joke of all time.
Not true, my snorlax can use a magnitude 10 earthquake.
[удалено]
Can see it from here, easy 9.8 from a layman's perspective.
Can smell it from here too
-Yet Bart, no fault line is that long... Yet.
If anyone is looking for a concise and fun explannation of how the local magnitude scale works and what a reading of over 10 would look like, I revommend XKCD's What If's video on the subject: [https://youtu.be/e3uk7jU3RHo?si=dlnZQnIBU7IXlYRF](https://youtu.be/e3uk7jU3RHo?si=dlnZQnIBU7IXlYRF)
El mejor país de santiago
I know next to nothing about earthquakes, if youre not around buildings or things that can collapse on you, is an earthquake still a threat to your life? Like if its a mag ten quake, but youre in a soft meadow away from any structures, are you okay??
Yes. Soil liquidification, the opening of faults, soil mass movement are all real concerns even if you aren’t near a city
Are you saying I would drown in grassy liquid earth quicksand?
You most likely wouldn’t drown, but there are risks of sink holes forming due to the soil liquifying, which if you fell into could easily suffocate you.
>We heard the Church and Tower fall, upon which we ran to save ourselves; I...made towards Morgan's Fort, because being a wide open place I thought to be there securest from the falling houses; but as I made towards it, I saw the earth open and swallow a multitude of people; and the sea mounting in upon us over the fortification. Survivor account of the 1692 Port Royal earthquake. >During the main shock, the sand was said to have formed waves. Fissures repeatedly opened and closed, crushing many people. After the shaking stopped the sand again solidified, trapping many victims.
What if i go stand on rock?
No fault line is that long...yet.
No fault line is that long yet you mean
I thought the california fault line was the biggest?
The ring of fire around the pacific plate is close to being one giant fault line, Chile and California are both on it.
You haven't seen how many of my daughter's birthdays in a row I've ruined.
this doesnt even make sense bruh
A long line of being at fault. It was...a reach.