The area-characteristic, maximum possible earthquake magnitude TM is
required by the earthquake engineering community, disaster management agencies
and the insurance industry. The Gutenberg-Richter law predicts that earthquake
magnitudes M follow a truncated exponential distribution. In the geophysical
literature several estimation procedures were proposed, see for instance Kijko
and Singh (Acta Geophys., 2011) and the references therein. Estimation of TM
is of course an extreme value problem to which the classical methods for
endpoint estimation could be applied. We argue that recent methods on truncated
tails at high levels (Beirlant et al., Extremes, 2016; Electron. J. Stat.,
2017) constitute a more appropriate setting for this estimation problem. We
present upper confidence bounds to quantify uncertainty of the point estimates.
We also compare methods from the extreme value and geophysical literature
through simulations. Finally, the different methods are applied to the
magnitude data for the earthquakes induced by gas extraction in the Groningen
province of the Netherlands