The amount of energy released in an earthquake is controlled by how much of the crust breaks. The good news is, we're not likely to see a magnitude 10.
On May 22, 1960, a devastating earthquake hit southern Chile. For 10 minutes, the ground shook so violently that people were unable to stay on their feet. Cracks opened in roads, and buildings collapsed. One man, quoted in a U.S. Geological Survey report about surviving the quake and its subsequent tsunami, initially thought the Cold War had escalated into nuclear Armageddon.
Magnitude is a measurement of the amount of energy released in an earthquake. It's slightly different from how intense an earthquake feels, which can be influenced by someone's distance from the epicenter and the conditions of the ground. The same quake will feel stronger to someone standing on loose soil and sand than to someone standing on firm bedrock, Bohon said.
"It's really the size of the dipping fault plane that is the biggest control on the maximum earthquake size, and those fault planes can get bigger in the subduction zone setting," Houston told Live Science. As this example shows, the difference between a magnitude 8 and a magnitude 9 quake, in terms of energy released, is a lot more than the difference between a magnitude 5 and a magnitude 6. Thus, nudging up an earthquake's magnitude from 9.5 to 9.6 takes a lot bigger of an area fault breaking than going between a magnitude 5.5 and 5.6.
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