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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) by Tork on Friday August 14 2015, @07:10PM
The Way We Measure Earthquakes is Stupid
No, what the author really meant to say is: "The unit of measurement we use for the masses to understand the effect of an earthquake is less than ideal." Not that I'm trying to be pedantic, but "measure it different!" is not the same as "can you clarify this for us?" (Can you tell I run into this sort of stuff on a daily basis at work?
Maybe SN could suggest a better way to measure earthquakes ...
I can tell you a few different ways it has been explained to me: "A big truck drove by.", "A jolt.", and "I fell out of my bed." With that in mind, maybe a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is "didnt' feel it" and 10 was "building leveled". The only problem is that you'd have to assign a score per-region. "The epi-center was an 8 but the neighboring city was a 4."
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