The Power of an Earthquarke

 

A lady friend of mine by the name of Ms Josephine Wong Hian Boon sent me a video of a huge chasm in what was once an olive field near Antakya that was ripped by sheer power of the recent Turkey- Syria earthquake.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IiDvo-xTinY&feature=share

 

I  would like to dedicate this article to her, Josephine Wong.

My feeling about an earthquake is the display of the power of Nature. It is so strong that it can shake parts of the Earth. Let’s have a look at how powerful the Turkey’s earthquake was.

 

The energy released by the 7.8 magnitude quake on Turkey and Syria was equal to around 32 petajoules according to seismologist Januka Attanayake at the University of Melbourne in Australia who told The New York Times.

 

(1 petajoules = 1,000,000 gigajoules)  

 

This means the power released by the Turkey earthquake was:

 

3.2^16 Joules, or 32 million gigajoules.

 

One gigajoule = 10 x 10⁹ (1000 million or one billion joules)

One petajoule is 10 x 10¹⁵ joules = 1 million billion joules or 278 gigawatt hours.

 

One ton of TNT releases 4.184 gigajoules or 4.184×10⁹ joules of energy

 

That amount of energy in Turkey’s earthquake is enough to generate 8.88 million megawatts continuously for one hour. It's also equivalent to the energy released by 7.6 million (nearly 8 million) tons of TNT.

 

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was only equivalent to about 20,000 tons of TNT or 83,680 gigajoules (8.368 x 10¹³ joules) of energy.

 

But the earthquake in Turkey was 32 million gigajoules = 32 x 10¹⁵ joules

 

This means it was equivalent to 382 atomic bombs dropping simultaneously onto Turkey.

 

If not an atom bomb, how does this compare to a hydrogen bomb?

 

The explosive power of hydrogen bombs is frequently expressed in megatons, each unit of which equals the explosive force of 1,000,000 tons of TNT.

 

One megaton hydrogen bomb or any weapon would have the energy equivalent of 1 million tons of TNT which is equivalent to 4.184 × 10¹⁵ joules, since one ton of TNT releases 4.184 gigajoules or 4.184×10⁹ joules of energy

 

Hence the earthquake that afflicted Turkey was still 7.7 times more powerful than a one megaton hydrogen bomb.

 

But if we were to go further into the calculations, a nuclear bomb filled with 212 tonnes of deuterium would produce a 5,200-megaton explosion.

 

If this deuterium bomb were to substitute the earthquake, then that would not only be the total end of Turkey but all countries around it would be annihilated.   

 

That would be the power of Nature.

 

Let us now use the Sun’s energy to compare.

 

The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star (G2V) formed about 4.6 billion years ago. Every second, the Sun's core fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium, and in the process converts 4 million tons of matter into energy.

 

In more technical language (sorry about that since astronomy is one of my areas of interest / study), the energy of the Sun comes from its proton–proton chain reactions that occurs

around 9.2×10³⁷ times per second in the core.

 

In the process it converts about 3.7×10³⁸ protons into alpha particles (helium nuclei) every second (out of a total of ~8.9×10⁵⁶ free protons in the Sun), or about 6.2×10¹¹ kg/s.  Each proton takes around 9 billion years to fuse with one another using the PP chain.  Fusing four free protons (hydrogen nuclei) into a single alpha particle (helium nucleus) release around 0.7% of the fused mass into energy.

 

In simple non-technical language, this means the Sun uses the mass–energy conversion by destroying itself at a rate of 4.26 million metric tons per second to release energy. This requires 600 metric megatons of hydrogen to yield 384.6 yottawatts (3.846×10²⁶ W)

 

This is equivalent to the power of 9.192×10¹⁰ (90,000,000,000) megatons of TNT per second. The Sun is about halfway through its lifespan and has about 5,000,000,000 (five billion) years more to go before it dies once its nuclear fuel (hydrogen into helium) is depleted.

 

During its death throes, it will start to consume its heavier elements and vast quantities of stellar material will hurtle into space as the sun's body expands to 100 times its current size to become a red giant, before it shrinks into a tiny, extremely dense white dwarf star about the size of Earth.

 

The origin of Earth rests on three theories, namely the core accretion theory, the disk instability theory and the pebble accretion theory. Whatever it was, it must have originated from the Sun from which Earth must have extracted its energy to form its molten core and the earthquakes. If that was right, then let’s have a look.

 

The Sun is 148.06 million km (1.4806 x 10¹¹ metres) away from this Earth.

 

A Sun-Earth sphere in space would subtend an area of 2.75 x 10 ²³ sq. metres given by the formula: pi r squared (4πr^2).

 

Within this sphere the Sun radiates its energy to reach Earth and of course far beyond Earth into the outer reaches of the Solar System though dim it might be far beyond Pluto.

 

The Sun radiates about 5.6 x 10 ²⁷ calories or 3.846×10²³ KW of energy per minute. Spread out this energy over a Sun-Earth sphere across 148.06 million km, Earth will receive 1.398 KW of solar energy per square metre on its surface (1 square km = 1000,000 square metres)

 

This is the solar constant we manage to derive here theoretically by mere calculation which fits practically and almost exactly the same as 1.3608 ± 0.0005 kW/m², which scientists found through measurement using sophisticated satellite technology.  

 

What scientists found was, the solar constant varies over an 11-year solar cycle, being 1.361 kilowatts per square meter (kW/m²) as the solar minimum when the number of sunspots is minimal, and approximately 0.1% greater (roughly 1.362 kW/m²) at solar maximum.

 

If we translate this solar constant over the entire surface of Earth which is 509 600 000 square km (5.096 x 10 ¹⁴ sq. metres) the total amount of energy the Earth receives round the Earth as it rotates evenly, would be 6.94 x 10¹⁴ kilowatt or 6.94 x 10¹⁴ kilojoules (Joule) per second or 5.99 x 10 ¹⁹ kilojoules each day.  

 

(1 kW = 1000 J/s)

 

But the earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria was 3.2 10³² joules, or 32 million gigajoules.

 

This was 5.3 x 10 ¹² (5.3 trillion) times more energy than the energy of the Sun gave to the entire Earth each day.

 

Another way of putting this is, if all the energy of the earthquake at 3.2 x 10¹⁶ Joules could be substituted for petrol, and put into an average car whose petrol consumption is between 8 – 12 litres per 100 km (10 litres per 100 km), this means it could go round and round the circumference of this world almost 250,000  times since the Earth’s circumference is 40,075 km in length, and the energy value of petrol is 3.204 x 10 ⁷ Joules per litre.   

 

The morale of my story is:

 

Respect the powers of Nature and never mess around with her up like we do with vaccines against Covid viruses. It does not work, and it shall never work for sure.

 

Lim ju boo