Earthquake Magnitude Scale Explained: How Big Is Big. And what happens when the numbers go far beyond anything the planet can handle
- Nov 17, 2025
- 2 min read
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Most of us hear about earthquakes in the usual range of 3 to 9 and assume the scale works like a thermometer with a neat top and bottom. Turns out the earthquake magnitude scale has no real limits. It can stretch dramatically in both directions, which is both fascinating and slightly alarming when you start imagining what those extremes would actually look like.
A magnitude 9 quake is already wild enough to tweak the rotation of the planet ever so slightly. Pushing that to a magnitude 10 would require a fault line long enough to make mapmakers cry. By magnitude 11, the imaginary fault would have to wrap halfway around the globe, which feels less like geology and more like fiction.
Now imagine magnitude 15. This would release so much energy it could boil away every drop of water on Earth. And by the time you reach magnitude 18, youâre looking at the kind of force capable of tearing a planet apartâsomething closer to science-fiction superweapons than anything that could naturally occur here. But the scale doesnât just stretch upward into cosmic chaos⌠it also dives downward into surprisingly tiny territory.
