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by Farino on September 22nd, 2007
The planet wouldn't break apart from earthquakes! Imagine an earthquake is like cracking through the chocolate shell of a Magnum ice cream, the sheets of chocolate don't come off the ice cream they just break up. That's what would happen in a very large earthquake. The crust will break up but stay on the planet.
by Glenn Blaylock on September 22nd, 2007
Just to add a little to Farino's answer, even if an earthquake were able to tear the Earth apart, you would not really be able to use the Richter Scale to measure is strength. The problem is that the Richter tends to max out somewhere between 8 and 9. There can be earthquakes that are much more powerful than this, but the Richter scale does not easily distinguish them. Thus, seismologist no longer use the Richter scale. It has been replaced by the Moment Magnitude scale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude).
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