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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, Informative) by KilroySmith on Friday August 14 2015, @07:21PM
Well, hell, a comment above made mine superfluous.
The Modified Mercalli scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercalli_intensity_scale/ [wikipedia.org] does exactly what I was trying to do.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 14 2015, @11:58PM
Those scales only work for inhabited areas, and depend on the quality of the ground and what's built on it.
Cute for newscasters, but highly unscientific, leading to the need to use a different scale for serious work, confusion at the scientist/layman interface, and nothing gained...