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THIS WEEKEND, A 3.3-magnitude earthquake rattled San Francisco ever so slightly. The small quake, like so many before it, passed, and San Franciscans went back to conveniently ignoring their seismic reality. Magnitude 3.3 earthquakes are clearly no big deal, and the city survived a 6.9-magnitude earthquake in 1989 mostly fine—how how much bigger will the Big One, at 8.0, be than 1989?
Ten times! As smarty-pants among you who understand logarithms may be thinking. But...that's wrong. On the current logarithmic earthquake scale, a whole number increase, like from 7.0 to 8.0, actually means a 32-fold increase in earthquake energy. Even if you can mentally do that math—and feel smug doing it—the logarithmic scale for earthquakes is terrible for intuitively communicating risk. "It's arbitrary," says Lucy Jones, a seismologist with the US Geological Survey. "I've never particularly liked it."
[Suggested New Earthquake Scale]: Seismological Review Letters
Maybe SN could suggest a better way to measure earthquakes ...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by calzone on Friday August 14 2015, @06:47PM
The scale is actually pretty good imo. Just tweak it into a lay-person's experiences.
0-5 and you're ok, going from "something shook?" to "wow, that was kind of rough"
5-10 and you're going to go from "crap, this may not turn out well" to "omfg the world is over!"
Anything else is overkill and makes it less comprehensible.
Time to leave Soylent News [soylentnews.org]