The 9.0 Earthquake in Indonesia
I lived in San Francisco during the earthquake of 1989. That earthquake was 7.1 on the Richter scale. The earthquake was powerful enough to cause freeways, buildings and a portion of the Bay Bridge to to collapse.
The Richter scale is a base-10 logarithmic scale. What that means is that a magnitude 8 earthquake is 10 times more powerful than a magnitude 7. A magnitude 9 is 100 times more powerful than a 7.
The recent 2004 Indian Ocean quake was approximately 100 times more powerful than the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 which I experienced and that was easily the scariest thing I’ve ever felt in my life.
Just think about it. We’re not talking about 2 times more powerful or 3 times more powerful, but 100 times more powerful.
The quake was so powerful that it caused the earth to wobble on its axis and changed the map of Asia. It also caused the giant tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people, left billions homeless and caused still-unkown billions of dollars in damage.
Wikipedia has an extensive article called the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake.
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