What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Anomalocaris]

Earthquake magnitudes are exponential.   a magnitude 5.2 earthquake would release as much energy as 2 magnitude 5.0 earthquakes.   a magnitude 6 earthquake would release 32 times as much energy as a magnitude 5 earthquake,  and a magnitude 9 earthquake will release nearly an million times as much energy as an magnitude 5 earthquake.

There can be no magnitude 10 earthquake, at least not if the earthquake is caused by fault movements driven by internal forces of the earth, and not by an asteroid impact.     This is because the strength of earth rocks puts an upper limit on how much energy can be stored in faults on earth before the fault has to rupture and release the energy.

I didn’t really need a lecture on seismology, but thanks all the same. 

Even taking into account the exponential nature of earthquake magnitudes, it still seems implausible. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of quakes every year. For a single quake to expend more energy than all those others, it would have to be a planet-buster.

I’m willing to retract my objection if you can provide a source.

Boru

if you had profited from the lecture then you should be able to look up the number of earthquakes of each magnitude that occurs in a decade, compute and add up the total relative energies of all but the largest one, and see for yourself if what i said was true.