It will almost certainly take several tens of thousands of years, if the growth rate for L'ihi is comparable to that of other Hawaiian volcanoes (about 0.1 foot per year averaged over geologic time).
A: The Richter scale is used to quantitatively measure the magnitude of an earthquake. This tool was devised by the seismologist Charles F. Richter in 1935. Full Answer >
The familiar Richter scale (which is not a physical device but rather a mathematical formula) is no longer widely used by scientists or the media to report an earthquake's size. Today, an earthquake's size is typically reported simply by its magnitude, which is a measure of the size of the earthquake's source, where the ground began shaking. While there are many modern scales used to calculate the magnitude, the most common is the moment magnitude, which allows for more precise measurements of large earthquakes than the Richter scale.