Imagine the power of 12 H bombs all going off at once.
Actually, an 8.0 earthquake releases the equivalent energy of a 6 megaton hydrogen bomb. This was a 9.0 so it would release the energy equal to 60, 1 megaton hydrogen bombs.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
12? It's much more than that. A Magnitude 9 earthquake is 1,800 megatons.
The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated was 50 megatons (and that was a one-off stunt by the Russians that wasn't a real weapon.) This quake was the power of 36 of those.
The thermonuclear warheads we have on our missles (minuteman and Trident) are 300 kilotons.
Thus, this quake was as powerful as about 54,000 warheads from American ICBMs. Or many times more powerful than every single nuclear weapon on the world going off at once.
. . . .sounds like the aftereffects of a good chili cook-off. . . . . minus the methane !! (Grin)
I heard on Fox News today that the 9.0 quake was equivalent to 35 megatons of TNT(this seems low to me). If true, it kinda makes me in awe at the destructive power of one of our 100 megaton hydrogen bombs.