4 ms·
The tectonic plates would just laugh at a nuclear explosion. They have infinitely more pressure and force at work vs. a bomb blast.
by qbasic_forever 3y ago
The tectonic plates would just laugh at a nuclear explosion. They have infinitely more pressure and force at work vs. a bomb blast.
- phkahler 3y agoNukes can be comparable to small earthquakes. This fault doesn't even have small quakes, it's locked so tight.
- nullc 3y agohttps://www.math.wichita.edu/~richardson/earthquake.html https://www.math.wichita.edu/~richardson/earthquake.html says a magnitude 9 earthquake is equivalent to 189 MT-tnt, so the largest atomic bomb detonated by mankind would be the energetic equivalent of an 8.6 magnitude earthquake. But it's not really a fair comparison, since the atomic bomb is fast and probably wouldn't couple its energy into the earth particularly well compared to an earthquake.
- nullc 3y agoIs that really true? Fusion weapons scale well and don't have an upper limit, their primary fuel is extremely inexpensive. I'm a total idiot, but I'm not aware of any reason why humanity couldn't build a thousand mile long hydrogen 'bomb' with a gigaton yield as some kind of mega-engineering project.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoSure, and the sun is technically the biggest hydrogen bomb in our solar system. But practically we are not going to build a bomb big enough to disrupt the tectonic plates beneath us.