That Richter fellow - measuring earthquakes
Been doing my reading about earthquakes. Apparently there's two basic ways to measure them: intensity and magnitude. Mostly people talk about magnitude, and almost always it's described using the Richter scale - also known as the local magnitude scale (ML) by those of you who are seismologists and know how to make that little "L".
The important thing to know about the Richter scale is that it's logarithmic. A 6.0 magnitude quake can be compared to a 1 megaton TNT boom, while a 7.0 earthquake is about a 50 megaton boom.
From today's Japan Times article:
The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station is designed to withstand an earthquake caused by an unknown active fault up to a magnitude of 6.5, casting into doubt the assumptions made about the strength of a possible temblor at the time the plant was planned.An increase of 0.2 in magnitude translates into a roughly twofold increase in energy released. The latest quake registered magnitude 6.8.
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