Richter Scale
With the earthquake in Haiti still fresh in everyone’s mind, it’s likely that even you may have uttered a Richter scale reading in the past day (I believe the last I heard for Haiti was 7.0). Sure, you know that the larger the number, the stronger the earthquake, but here are a few additional facts about the Richter Magnitude Scale:
- developed by Charles Richter at the California Institute of Technology in 1935
- instruments called seismographs record the amplitude of ground movement
- Richter’s scale then takes the seismograph readings into account with the distance between them, the earthquake’s epicenter, and computes a number based on a logarithm.
- there is NO upper limit on the Richter scale (yes, there can technically be something larger than 10.0)
- “each whole number step in the magnitude scale corresponds to the release of about 31 times more energy than the amount associated with the preceding whole number value” 1
- all information including the quote courtesy of http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/richter.php ↩
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