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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!
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To: Grainne who wrote (92750)1/6/2005 7:54:58 PM
From: Lazarus_Long   of 108807
 
Hmmm. Good question. My first instincts were "NO, the energy involved in earthquakes is much greater than nuclear weapons release " BUT

According to Tad Murty, vice-president of the Tsunami Society, the total energy of the tsunami waves was about five megatons of TNT (20 petajoules). This is more than twice the total explosive energy used during all of World War II (including the two atomic bombs), but still a couple of orders of magnitude less than the energy released in the earthquake itself [17]
en.wikipedia.org
5 megatons? No sweat. The standard US nuclear warhead is supposed to be one megaton. Five of those and there's your tsunami. But not that magnitude 9 earthquake.

Also from that article
Power of the earthquake

The total energy released by the earthquake in the Indian Ocean has been estimated as 2.0 exajoules (2.0×1018 joules) [13] (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqinthenews/2004/usslav/neic_slav_faq.html). Using the mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc2, this amount of energy is equivalent to a mass of about 22 kg (49 lb). Note that each unit of the magnitude scale represents a 31.6-fold increase in energy; every two units signifies 1,000 times more energy.
A megaton is 4*10^15 joules.
musr.physics.ubc.ca
2*10^18 joules is 500 megatons. Nuclear war size.

BUT a bomb would not have to provide ALL the energy; it need only trigger its release. And here things get very speculative. So far doing that reliably without undesired side effects is an unknown. Seriously risky. California might be 500 feet underwater. Which I would not approve of.
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