Richter magnitude scale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Richter magnitude scale

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The expression Richter magnitude scale refers to a number of ways to assign a single number to quantify the energy contained in an earthquake. In all cases, the magnitude is a base-10 logarithmic scale obtained by calculating the logarithm of the amplitude of waves measured by a seismograph. An earthquake that measures 5.0 on the Richter scale has a shaking amplitude 10 times larger than one that measures 4.0.

Contents
1 Development 2 Details 3 Richter magnitudes 3.1 Examples 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Development
Developed in 1935 by Charles Richter in partnership with Beno Gutenberg, both of the California Institute of Technology, the scale was firstly intended to be used only in a particular study area in California, and on seismograms recorded on a particular instrument, the Wood-Anderson torsion seismograph. Richter originally reported values to the nearest quarter of a unit, but values were later reported with one decimal place. His motivation for creating the local magnitude scale was to measure the ratio of small to larger earthquakes[citation needed]. His inspiration was the apparent magnitude scale used in astronomy to describe the brightness of stars and other celestial objects[citation needed]. Richter arbitrarily chose a magnitude 0 event to be an earthquake that would show a maximum combined horizontal displacement of 1 m (0.00004 in) on a seismogram recorded using a Wood-Anderson torsion seismograph 100 km (62 mi) from the earthquake epicenter. This choice was intended to prevent negative magnitudes from being assigned. The smallest earthquakes that could be recorded and located at the time were of magnitude 3, approximately. However, the Richter scale has no lower limit, and sensitive modern seismographs now routinely record quakes with negative magnitudes. ML was not designed to be applied to data with distances to the hypocenter of the earthquake greater than 600 km.[1] For national and local seismological observatories the standard magnitude scale is today still ML. Unfortunately this scale saturates at M6.5, approximately, because the high frequency waves recorded locally have wavelengths shorter than the rupture lengths of large earthquakes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale

18-06-2011