we would expericene a magnitude 20 earthquake?

What if you would experience a magnitude 20 earth quake? To understand just how big a magnitude 20 earthquake would be, let’s take a look at the Richter scale. The Richter scale is a logarithmic scale that rates the amount of energy released by an earthquake. What does logarithmic mean? In this case, it means that the amount of energy released increases 31.7 times between whole number values on the scale. For example, a 2.0ML [magnitude 2] quake is 32 times as energetic as a 1.0ML event. And a 3.0ML quake is 1,000 times more powerful than a 1.0ML event. The largest earthquake ever recorded registered a magnitude of 9.5, and it caused about five billion dollars in damage. It killed 1,655 people and left two million people homeless.

So how much worse would a magnitude 20 be?

To properly prepare for an earthquake this big, we need to understand what causes earthquakes in general. Earthquakes are vibrations that travel through the crust of the Earth. They can be caused by events like volcanic eruptions and meteor impacts but the movement of tectonic plates is what usually causes them.

These plates, which make up the Earth’s crust, can slide against each other at a region called the transform boundary. When the plates move in different directions, they can cause a break in the Earth’s crust called a fault line. This is where most earthquakes take place.

The plates create friction as they push together tightly, and if there’s enough friction, they can become locked together and stop sliding. But the forces of the Earth will continue to push against them and increase the pent-up energy and pressure.

When the pressure builds up enough, it will overcome the friction and result in an intense and sudden shift. This causes the vibration we know as an earthquake. And the longer the fault line, the more massive the earthquake.

So how long of a fault line would be required to produce a magnitude 20 earthquake? Well, let’s put it this way. To produce a magnitude 10.5 earthquake, you’d need a fault length of about 80,000 km.

And given that the Earth’s circumference is only about 40,000 km, that would be highly unlikely. With all that considered, a magnitude 20 earthquake seems pretty impossible.
The only thing that could cause a magnitude 20 earthquake would be an really big asteroid. But if an asteroid that could cause an such a big earthquake hits earth the earthquake would destroy the planet.