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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @07:01PM
Indicating energy levels is irrelevant for most people. How two people experience the same earthquake depends on so many factors - how deep the epicentre is, how far you are from the epicentre, what soil types are between you and the epicentre, what underground topology is, what kind of structure you're in and so on. It's a long list.
Other scales like modified Mercalli index try to indicate the magnitude in terms of how it affects the observer - this means the value is different for two different observers in two different locations. This is better, but doesn't satisfy the news organizations that prefer one number for everyone.
People always try to map complex information to a single value with little success (usually). I mean, how many people actually fit a "large" shirt?
The answer is: there will never be an earthquake measurement system that satisfies everyone.