Where will the next earthquake be and its magnitude?

What magnitude earthquake in California will bring Tahiti level chaos and destruction?

• 10? 11? 12? Also will it cause major canyon size cracks on earth and make Vegas beach front property like the movie 2012 depicted devouring everything? Is there a maximum magnitude earthquake you can have? Can you have magnitude 20 or above? I posted question here cause I didn't get any answer in the geology forum & since military people know everything.

• Answer:

  You would have to see 10+ to see that kind of devastation. First off, many buildings in Haiti are built by stacking bricks and cinder-blocks on top of each other - without benefit of mortar. A tiny quake and they fall apart... Something that the HUGE majority of folks don't think about is the actual fault info and tectonic plate info involved in the Left Coast of the US. California will never "fall off" the coast - the land mass on the west side of the fault line is actually headed NORTH. Eventually, LA will be west of Seattle... and the Baja peninsula will be in place of LA. We're also not talking about years, we're talking about MILLIONS of years. There is not an acutal maximum rating for the maginitude of an earthquake. A 2.0 is exactly 10 times as powerful as a 1.0. A 3.0 is ten times as powerful as a 2.0... etcetera. So, to extapolate, an 11.0 is ten times stronger than a 10.0 - and so on, forever and ever. The "problem" is that eventually it becomes extraordinarily unlikely that you will be any stronger than around a 9.5... it's a matter of statistics. Kinda like the fact that there is no upward limit of how tall a person can be... but it is rarer and rarer to see people over 6'6"... and although the limit right now is about 7'9", we will eventually see one taller... and taller still. Yeah, we can possibly see a magnitude 15 quake - but the likelihood is extremely remote. Watch out if it ever happens, though.