>>>>Looks like it could be a big one on all the pacific coastlines
>>>>
>>>>
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12709598>>>
>>>This is a really bad one. The quake was bad enough, then add tsunami waves 10 meters high.
>>>
>>>I learned something I didn't know driving Emily to school a few minutes ago. She said what is the highest earthquake magnitude? I told her to look up Richter scale on her iPhone. She said the site she looked at says there is no upper end. What kind of scale is that?
>>
>>A lot of scales don't have an upper limit. For instance, there is no maximum temperature, only a minimum. The same goes for stupidity, clearly! :-)
>>
>>NB! I don't mean you.... In fact, I don't have anyone particular in mind.
>
>Suuuure you didn't ;-)
>
>No offense taken. My knowledge of science is definitely not top shelf compared to a lot of people here.
There's a wiki site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scaleits worth noting that the scale is logarithmic so a 8 magnitude quake is 10 times larger than a 7.