Imagine Burj Khalifa on a quake night

Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, stands at an incredible 830 meters and is a true engineering marvel. Despite the fact that the UAE is not known for its earthquake risk, the Burj Khalifa was built with modern seismic engineering.

The building’s 3.7-meter-thick concrete foundation is supported by 194 bored, cast-in-place piles. These piles, which measure 1.5 meters in diameter and 43 meters in length, are the largest of their kind currently in use in the UAE, according to the Burj Khalifa’s website. They help the structure to withstand earthquakes of up to magnitude 7.0.

As a result, the 10.0 magnitude earthquake is enormously powerful. Remember that this is a logarithmic (base 10) scale. A magnitude 10.0 earthquake would be roughly 100 times more powerful than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

The strongest recorded earthquake was 9.5 in Chile in 1960. A magnitude of 10.0 would be several times greater and more powerful. So, it seems that magnitude 10.0 earthquakes appear to be impossible.

So, if a magnitude 10.0 earthquake occurs, the structure will almost certainly fail because it is designed to keep people safe in magnitude 7 earthquakes.