Relative Sizes of Some Recent Seismic Events

Alan Kafka
Weston Observatory
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Boston College

A few things about this plot (all numbers are approximate, but they are correct enough for this level of analysis):

kT = kilotons

2013 DA14 refers to how big an event the near-Earth asteroid that missed us on Friday, Feb. 15, 2013 would have been if it crashed.

Japan quake is the 2011 mega-quake, and Haiti quake is the 2010 quake that devastated Haiti.

Haiti quake (magnitude 7) is very small (in terms of magnitude) compared to Japan quake (magnitude 9).

Everything else is very small compared to Japan quake.

In very rough numbers/guesstimate: The meteorite that killed the dinosaurs was equivalent to something like magnitude 10 to 12. If we use the number 11, that’s at least 100 times bigger than Japan quake. So, if we plotted the dinosaur meteorite, everything else here would probably be too small to see.