What would a 14.5 earthquake centered on Manhattan do? Are the buildings quake-proof enough?
Mar 05, 2010
in
Earthquake Questions
14.5 on the Richter scale.
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4 comments
Here, Kitteh Kitteh on March 5, 2010 at 7:00 pm
A 14.5 would literally powder the bedrock. Buildings and everything else would probably be tossed into the air. They estimate that the Chicxulub impact (the one that killed dinosaurs) only made a 13.0 quake when it hit.
As far as the buildings in Manhattan, something as small as a 6.0 would do a whole lot of damage since that area is not earthquake prone and building earthquake resistant buildings is not a priority in the building codes there. Plus, there are a lot of old masonry buildings, and they are the ones most easily damaged in a quake.
Jeffery on March 5, 2010 at 7:00 pm
a 14.5 would destroy everything. And even if they were quake-proof (which they are not) it would still destroy everything. The largest ever recorded was a 9.5.
LBriscoe on March 5, 2010 at 7:00 pm
The richter scale is not linear. So a 6 on the richter scale is not double the magnitude of a 3. It’s more like 50x worse (that’s not an actual number, just an estimate).
So a 14.5 is ridiculous. Like earth’s orbit-altering ridiculous. Mahattan would be gone, as well as Chicago, and San Francisco. It’d be HUGE.
Roger K on March 5, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Earthquakes these days are measured on the moment magnitude scale (abbreviated as MMS).
Like the Richter scale, the MMS is logarithmic, where an earthquake one whole number greater has 10 times the amplitude and has approximately 31.6 times more energy. For example, M7.0 has about 31.6 times the energy of M6.0, and 1000 (which is to say 31.6^2) times the energy of M5.0.
The strongest recorded quake is about 9.5
Going up the scale cumulatively, 14.5 quake would be:
9.5 to 10.5 = 10 x stronger than the strongest recorded quake
10.5 to 11.5 = 100 x
11.5 to 12.5 = 1.000 x
12.5 to 13.5 = 10,000 x
13.5 to 14.5 = 100,000 x
So there would be about 100,000 times the amplitude and 31,509,057 times the energy in a 14.5 quake than in a 9.5 quake. I seriously doubt that there would be any man made structures that would remain upright and intact after that force.