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The Way We Measure Earthquakes is Stupid

posted by janrinok on Friday August 14 2015, @06:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the shake,-rattle-and-roll dept.

AnonTechie writes:

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 Sunday August 16 2015, @10:34AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday August 16 2015, @10:34AM (#223489) Journal

    Let's rewrite his statement to Terajoule:

    The smallest earthquakes routinely recorded by most networks (M 2.0), would be about 1 Terajoule, a barely damaging earthquake (M 5) would be 40,000 Terajoule, Northridge would be 12 million Terajoule, and the great Chilean earthquake would be twenty trillion Exajoule.

    So how are his Akis better, again? Heck, even the "reporting threshold" is perfect with Terajoule

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 16 2015, @10:49AM

    by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Sunday August 16 2015, @10:49AM (#223498) Journal

    Err, 1014 = 100 terajoules = 1 Aki.

    Your point pretty much stands though. We could express all earthquakes in petajoules.

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