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 takyon on Saturday August 15 2015, @04:43AM
If you had continued reading the paragraph you quoted, you would have found these bits:
Back to evil Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
The author wants to use a unit called Aki, with 1 Aki equal to 1021 dynes-cm or 1014 N-m. Hmm... N-m... aka a newton-meter... what could that be a measurement [wikipedia.org] of?
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday August 15 2015, @09:55PM
So 1 Aki = 100 Terajoule? Then why not simply say the latter?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 15 2015, @10:02PM
Lucy Jones seems to want to normalize the imperceptible tremors to a fraction of 1 unit, small earthquakes from 1 to low thousands of units, and then hundreds of thousands all the way to billions for the actual and biggest earthquakes. But it's all joules in the end.
Jones wants this unit so that the public and journalists can understand earthquake strength more intuitively than "7.0 mag is 32 times stronger than 6.0 mag".
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 16 2015, @10:34AM
Let's rewrite his statement to Terajoule:
So how are his Akis better, again? Heck, even the "reporting threshold" is perfect with Terajoule
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 16 2015, @10:49AM
Err, 1014 = 100 terajoules = 1 Aki.
Your point pretty much stands though. We could express all earthquakes in petajoules.
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