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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 maxwell demon on Saturday August 15 2015, @12:59PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday August 15 2015, @12:59PM (#223250) Journal

    Indeed, with a direct base 10, it would mean that increasing the magnitude by 1 would mean increasing the energy by one order of magnitude.

    However, in the end the scale is based on decimal values: A difference of 2 in the magnitude corresponds to a factor of 1000.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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