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posted by janrinok on Friday August 14 2015, @06:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the shake,-rattle-and-roll dept.

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 ...


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  • (Score: 2) by Tramii on Friday August 14 2015, @06:52PM

    by Tramii (920) on Friday August 14 2015, @06:52PM (#222953)

    It's not great for lay understanding of the phenomenon, but that's really better understood in terms of damage and deaths anyways.

    Exactly! It's not meant to be easily understood by non-scientists because it doesn't need to be. What exactly is your average person supposed to do with the knowledge of how "big" an earthquake was? The only reason people want to know is so they can talk about it the next day at work and compare it to other earthquakes. You and I can't do anything useful with that knowledge, so why try to change something that doesn't matter?

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